News of the Weird (July 7, 2013)
News of the Weird
Weirdnuz.M326, July 7, 2013
Copyright 2013 by Chuck Shepherd
Lead Story
PREVIOUSLY ON WEIRD UNIVERSE: As many as 50 exam monitors were forced to take cover at a high school in Zhongxiang, China, in June, fending off outraged students (and some parents) who hurled insults and stones at them after the monitors blocked cheating schemes on the all-important national “gaokao” exams. (It was “siege warfare,” and eventually “hundreds” of police responded, according to a dispatch in the Daily Telegraph of London.) Metal detectors had found secret transmitters and contraband cell phones used by groups beaming in exam answers from outside. Independent proctors had been assigned because of longstanding suspicions that the schools’ own proctors routinely enabled cheating (with results such as the 99 identical papers submitted in one subject on the previous year’s exam). Said one student (in the mob of about 2,000), noting how widespread cheating is nationally, “There is no fairness if you do not let us cheat [also].” [Daily Telegraph (London), 6-20-2013]
Things People Believe
Sheriffs and government deed-recorders in several states have reported annoying attempts recently by “Moorish American nationals” to confiscate temporarily vacant houses (often, mansions), moving in without inhibition, changing the locks, and partying joyously--based on made-up documents full of gobbledegook and stilted legalese granting them sovereignty beyond the reach of law-enforcement. There is a venerable Moorish Temple Science of America, but these trespassers in Florida, Maryland, Tennessee, and other states are from fanciful offshoots that demand reparations (usually in gold) for Christopher-Columbus-era Europeans having stolen “their” land. A North Carolina police investigator told the Washington Post in March that “every state” is experiencing the “Moorish American” invasion. [Washington Post, 3-18-2013] [South Florida Sun-Sentinel, 1-28-2013]
PREVIOUSLY: Britain’s Anomalous Mind Management Abductee Contactee Helpline is the nation’s “weirdest” support group, wrote the Daily Mirror in June, providing a range of services to victims of kidnaping by extraterrestrials and of other haunting incidents to about 1,500 people a year, according to co-founder Miles Johnston. AMMACH uses an ordinary wall-stud detector to locate bodily implants and employs magnetic field meters and mineral lamps to identify “signatures” left on a skin’s atoms by visits to another dimensional reality, Johnston explained. “We are under the threat of termination as a species if we do not get this sorted out.” [Daily Mirror, 6-9-2013]
Cliches Come to Life
Sheriff’s deputies arrested Shane Kersey, 35, in March as the one who made phone calls to four schools in New Orleans’s Westbank neighborhood, threatening to burn them down. When taken into custody, Kersey had aluminum foil wrapped around his skull and secured by a baseball cap but explained to an officer that he needed it “to prevent microwave signals from entering his head.” [WWL-TV (New Orleans), 3-6-2013]
Among the character witnesses in May at the New York City sex-trafficking trial of alleged pimp Vincent George, Jr., 33, and his father were three of the younger man’s ladies, who praised him unconditionally to the jury as a good father to the children they bore for him and as the person responsible for helping them kick their drug habits. Heather Keith, 28, and Danielle Geissler, 31, referred to each other as Vincent, Jr.,’s “wife-in-law.” Geissler admitted that George (“Daddy”) slapped her around a bit, explaining that they both “slapped each other around sometimes but never over work or staying in the [prostitution] life.” (Three weeks later, the Georges were acquitted of sex-trafficking although convicted of money-laundering.) [New York Daily News, 5-28-2013; 6-19-2013]
Oops!
Tim Blackburn, 50, fell off a ladder in Stockton-on-Tees, England, in 2007, and shattered his arm so badly that doctors had to remove four inches of bone and attach a metal scaffold around his arm that took six years to heal completely (and then only because of help from a cutting-edge ultrasound procedure). In May 2013--one day after he got a clean bill of health--Blackburn tripped over his dog and tumbled down the stairs in his home, and his arm “snapped like a twig,” he said. [United Press International, 5-22-2013]
Bright Ideas
PREVIOUSLY: Technology companies are making great strides in odor-detection robots, valuable in identifying subtle scents ranging from contaminants in beer-brewing to cancerous tumors in the body. And then there is CrazyLabo in Fukuoka, Japan, which is marketing two personal-hygiene robots, available for special occasions such as parties, according to a May BBC News report. One detector, shaped as a woman’s kissable head, tests breath odor and responds (e.g., “smells like citrus”; “there’s an emergency taking place”). The other, resembling a dog, checks a person’s feet and can either cuddle up to the subject (no odor) or appear to pass out. [BBC News, 5-8-2013]
PREVIOUSLY: The local council in Brunete, Spain, near Madrid, has now seen a radical drop in unscooped dog droppings after employing volunteers to find the names of derelict dogs. They then matched the dog with town’s dog registrations to obtain the owners’ addresses, then mailed them packages containing their dogs’ business (terming it “lost property”). [Daily Telegraph (London), 6-4-2013]
Perspective
PREVIOUSLY: Elementary school teacher Carie Charlesworth was fired recently by Holy Trinity School near San Diego, Calif.--with the only reason given that her ex-husband has threatened to kill her. After a January weekend in which Carie was forced to call police three times because of the threats, the husband had shown up the next day in Holy Trinity’s parking lot to see her, provoking officials to immediately put the school in lockdown. In a termination letter, officials noted that Charlesworth’s students are constantly at risk from the ex-husband, that her restraining order against him is obviously not a deterrent, and that they thus “cannot allow” her to continue her career at the school, according to a report by San Diego’s KNSD-TV. (Battered-women support groups, of course, were horrified at the school’s decision.) [KNSD-TV, 6-12-2013]
Creme de la Weird
Yasuomi Hirai, 26, was arrested in Hyogo Prefecture, Japan, in June after being identified in news reports as the man who had crawled “dozens of meters” in an underground gutter solely to gain access to a particular sidewalk grate near Konan Women’s University in order to look up at skirt-wearers passing over the grate. After one pedestrian, noting the pair of eyes below, summoned a police officer, Hirai scurried down the gutter and escaped, but since he had been detained several months earlier on a similar complaint, police soon seized him, and indeed, he later admitted, “I have done this numerous times.” [Japan Daily Press, 6-13-2013] [Kotaku.com, 6-21-2013]
Undignified Deaths
The man who claimed the “world’s record” for traveling the farthest distance on a zip line attached only to his hair was killed in April as he similarly attempted to cross the Teesta River in West Bengal, India, on a zip line. He died of a heart attack, and since observers were unclear whether his limpness was part of the performance, he hung lifeless for 45 minutes. (He was identified in news reports as a “Guinness Book” record-holder, but as with many such claims, the Guinness Book has no such category.) [BBC News, 4-29-2013]
A 22-year-old man was killed in March attempting to rope-swing from the picturesque, 140-foot-high Corona Arch near Moab, Utah, trying to emulate a famous 2012 Internet video at the Arch, “World’s Largest Rope Swing.” This man, however, apparently overestimated the length of rope he would need to launch himself off the Arch to begin his swing--and crashed to the ground. [KSL-TV (Salt Lake City), 3-25-2013]
A News of the Weird Classic (July 2009)
A 48-year-old immigrant from Malta regularly hangs out in various New York City bars, but always on the floor, so that he can enjoy his particular passion of being stepped on. "Georgio T." told the New York Times in June [2009] that he has delighted in being stepped on since he was a kid. While one playmate "wanted to be the doctor, [another] wanted to be the carpenter . . . I would want to be the carpet." Nowadays, he carries a custom-made rug he can affix to his back (and a sign, Step on Carpet) and may lie face-down for several hours if the bar is busy. He is also a regular at "high foot-traffic" fetish parties, where dozens of stompers (especially women in stilettos) can satisfy their own urges while gratifying Georgio. [New York Times, 6-14-2009]
Thanks This Week to David Miller, Dave Bonan, Ellen Shannon, and Cynthia Hall, and to the News of the Weird Board of Editorial Advisors.
Weirdnuz.M326, July 7, 2013
Copyright 2013 by Chuck Shepherd
Lead Story
PREVIOUSLY ON WEIRD UNIVERSE: As many as 50 exam monitors were forced to take cover at a high school in Zhongxiang, China, in June, fending off outraged students (and some parents) who hurled insults and stones at them after the monitors blocked cheating schemes on the all-important national “gaokao” exams. (It was “siege warfare,” and eventually “hundreds” of police responded, according to a dispatch in the Daily Telegraph of London.) Metal detectors had found secret transmitters and contraband cell phones used by groups beaming in exam answers from outside. Independent proctors had been assigned because of longstanding suspicions that the schools’ own proctors routinely enabled cheating (with results such as the 99 identical papers submitted in one subject on the previous year’s exam). Said one student (in the mob of about 2,000), noting how widespread cheating is nationally, “There is no fairness if you do not let us cheat [also].” [Daily Telegraph (London), 6-20-2013]
Things People Believe
Sheriffs and government deed-recorders in several states have reported annoying attempts recently by “Moorish American nationals” to confiscate temporarily vacant houses (often, mansions), moving in without inhibition, changing the locks, and partying joyously--based on made-up documents full of gobbledegook and stilted legalese granting them sovereignty beyond the reach of law-enforcement. There is a venerable Moorish Temple Science of America, but these trespassers in Florida, Maryland, Tennessee, and other states are from fanciful offshoots that demand reparations (usually in gold) for Christopher-Columbus-era Europeans having stolen “their” land. A North Carolina police investigator told the Washington Post in March that “every state” is experiencing the “Moorish American” invasion. [Washington Post, 3-18-2013] [South Florida Sun-Sentinel, 1-28-2013]
PREVIOUSLY: Britain’s Anomalous Mind Management Abductee Contactee Helpline is the nation’s “weirdest” support group, wrote the Daily Mirror in June, providing a range of services to victims of kidnaping by extraterrestrials and of other haunting incidents to about 1,500 people a year, according to co-founder Miles Johnston. AMMACH uses an ordinary wall-stud detector to locate bodily implants and employs magnetic field meters and mineral lamps to identify “signatures” left on a skin’s atoms by visits to another dimensional reality, Johnston explained. “We are under the threat of termination as a species if we do not get this sorted out.” [Daily Mirror, 6-9-2013]
Cliches Come to Life
Sheriff’s deputies arrested Shane Kersey, 35, in March as the one who made phone calls to four schools in New Orleans’s Westbank neighborhood, threatening to burn them down. When taken into custody, Kersey had aluminum foil wrapped around his skull and secured by a baseball cap but explained to an officer that he needed it “to prevent microwave signals from entering his head.” [WWL-TV (New Orleans), 3-6-2013]
Among the character witnesses in May at the New York City sex-trafficking trial of alleged pimp Vincent George, Jr., 33, and his father were three of the younger man’s ladies, who praised him unconditionally to the jury as a good father to the children they bore for him and as the person responsible for helping them kick their drug habits. Heather Keith, 28, and Danielle Geissler, 31, referred to each other as Vincent, Jr.,’s “wife-in-law.” Geissler admitted that George (“Daddy”) slapped her around a bit, explaining that they both “slapped each other around sometimes but never over work or staying in the [prostitution] life.” (Three weeks later, the Georges were acquitted of sex-trafficking although convicted of money-laundering.) [New York Daily News, 5-28-2013; 6-19-2013]
Oops!
Tim Blackburn, 50, fell off a ladder in Stockton-on-Tees, England, in 2007, and shattered his arm so badly that doctors had to remove four inches of bone and attach a metal scaffold around his arm that took six years to heal completely (and then only because of help from a cutting-edge ultrasound procedure). In May 2013--one day after he got a clean bill of health--Blackburn tripped over his dog and tumbled down the stairs in his home, and his arm “snapped like a twig,” he said. [United Press International, 5-22-2013]
Bright Ideas
PREVIOUSLY: Technology companies are making great strides in odor-detection robots, valuable in identifying subtle scents ranging from contaminants in beer-brewing to cancerous tumors in the body. And then there is CrazyLabo in Fukuoka, Japan, which is marketing two personal-hygiene robots, available for special occasions such as parties, according to a May BBC News report. One detector, shaped as a woman’s kissable head, tests breath odor and responds (e.g., “smells like citrus”; “there’s an emergency taking place”). The other, resembling a dog, checks a person’s feet and can either cuddle up to the subject (no odor) or appear to pass out. [BBC News, 5-8-2013]
PREVIOUSLY: The local council in Brunete, Spain, near Madrid, has now seen a radical drop in unscooped dog droppings after employing volunteers to find the names of derelict dogs. They then matched the dog with town’s dog registrations to obtain the owners’ addresses, then mailed them packages containing their dogs’ business (terming it “lost property”). [Daily Telegraph (London), 6-4-2013]
Perspective
PREVIOUSLY: Elementary school teacher Carie Charlesworth was fired recently by Holy Trinity School near San Diego, Calif.--with the only reason given that her ex-husband has threatened to kill her. After a January weekend in which Carie was forced to call police three times because of the threats, the husband had shown up the next day in Holy Trinity’s parking lot to see her, provoking officials to immediately put the school in lockdown. In a termination letter, officials noted that Charlesworth’s students are constantly at risk from the ex-husband, that her restraining order against him is obviously not a deterrent, and that they thus “cannot allow” her to continue her career at the school, according to a report by San Diego’s KNSD-TV. (Battered-women support groups, of course, were horrified at the school’s decision.) [KNSD-TV, 6-12-2013]
Creme de la Weird
Yasuomi Hirai, 26, was arrested in Hyogo Prefecture, Japan, in June after being identified in news reports as the man who had crawled “dozens of meters” in an underground gutter solely to gain access to a particular sidewalk grate near Konan Women’s University in order to look up at skirt-wearers passing over the grate. After one pedestrian, noting the pair of eyes below, summoned a police officer, Hirai scurried down the gutter and escaped, but since he had been detained several months earlier on a similar complaint, police soon seized him, and indeed, he later admitted, “I have done this numerous times.” [Japan Daily Press, 6-13-2013] [Kotaku.com, 6-21-2013]
Undignified Deaths
The man who claimed the “world’s record” for traveling the farthest distance on a zip line attached only to his hair was killed in April as he similarly attempted to cross the Teesta River in West Bengal, India, on a zip line. He died of a heart attack, and since observers were unclear whether his limpness was part of the performance, he hung lifeless for 45 minutes. (He was identified in news reports as a “Guinness Book” record-holder, but as with many such claims, the Guinness Book has no such category.) [BBC News, 4-29-2013]
A 22-year-old man was killed in March attempting to rope-swing from the picturesque, 140-foot-high Corona Arch near Moab, Utah, trying to emulate a famous 2012 Internet video at the Arch, “World’s Largest Rope Swing.” This man, however, apparently overestimated the length of rope he would need to launch himself off the Arch to begin his swing--and crashed to the ground. [KSL-TV (Salt Lake City), 3-25-2013]
A News of the Weird Classic (July 2009)
A 48-year-old immigrant from Malta regularly hangs out in various New York City bars, but always on the floor, so that he can enjoy his particular passion of being stepped on. "Georgio T." told the New York Times in June [2009] that he has delighted in being stepped on since he was a kid. While one playmate "wanted to be the doctor, [another] wanted to be the carpenter . . . I would want to be the carpet." Nowadays, he carries a custom-made rug he can affix to his back (and a sign, Step on Carpet) and may lie face-down for several hours if the bar is busy. He is also a regular at "high foot-traffic" fetish parties, where dozens of stompers (especially women in stilettos) can satisfy their own urges while gratifying Georgio. [New York Times, 6-14-2009]
Thanks This Week to David Miller, Dave Bonan, Ellen Shannon, and Cynthia Hall, and to the News of the Weird Board of Editorial Advisors.
Comments
NYC Sex-Trafficking When is America going to figure out that it is more profitable to regulate 'the life' than prosecute it?
Tim Blackburn It's called 'luck', Tim. You're just on the wrong end of it.
Yasuomi Hirai Yo! Ladies! That's why they make slacks! Wear them and quit leading us men into temptation!
Corona Arch Swing I saw that video and they told us NOT TO DO THIS OURSELVES. So, I didn't.
Maltese Rug I had a tapestry from there but it never wanted to be stepped on. It seemed happiest just hanging around.
Moorish Temple Science I've been pondering if I should comment on this black outfit from Chicago, that seems to be getting away with grand larceny, and risk being called a racist or if I should just leave it alone. As it seem, also, to be popular of late, to allow black groups to do just about anything they want (like standing in front of voting stations with clubs) with impunity one would think that I'd've chosen the wise course and just kept my mouth shut but such, it seems, is not the case.
Tim Blackburn It's called 'luck', Tim. You're just on the wrong end of it.
Yasuomi Hirai Yo! Ladies! That's why they make slacks! Wear them and quit leading us men into temptation!
Corona Arch Swing I saw that video and they told us NOT TO DO THIS OURSELVES. So, I didn't.
Maltese Rug I had a tapestry from there but it never wanted to be stepped on. It seemed happiest just hanging around.
Moorish Temple Science I've been pondering if I should comment on this black outfit from Chicago, that seems to be getting away with grand larceny, and risk being called a racist or if I should just leave it alone. As it seem, also, to be popular of late, to allow black groups to do just about anything they want (like standing in front of voting stations with clubs) with impunity one would think that I'd've chosen the wise course and just kept my mouth shut but such, it seems, is not the case.
Posted by Expat47 in Athens, Greece on 07/07/13 at 10:40 AM
moorish- Squaters, plain and simple. When did that become legal?
broken arm- Made me think of this. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FQ5ob9B9yD4
mailed poop- That is great! Absolutely hilarious!!
religious school- No sympathy from the religious school, why does that NOT surprise me.
skirt peeper- The girls should have returned with something disgusting to dump on him.
zip by hair- Much like the Crocodile hunter, concidering his hobby, who would ever have thought he would die like that.
rope swing- SWING AND A HIT!
rug man- His rug should say 'Do Tread On Me'
broken arm- Made me think of this. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FQ5ob9B9yD4
mailed poop- That is great! Absolutely hilarious!!
religious school- No sympathy from the religious school, why does that NOT surprise me.
skirt peeper- The girls should have returned with something disgusting to dump on him.
zip by hair- Much like the Crocodile hunter, concidering his hobby, who would ever have thought he would die like that.
rope swing- SWING AND A HIT!
rug man- His rug should say 'Do Tread On Me'
Posted by Patty in Ohio, USA on 07/07/13 at 06:52 PM
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