Fresh Loaf

LEAD STORY: Beneath the luxury hotels on the Las Vegas Strip is a series of flood tunnels that are home to dozens of people who work odd jobs such as hustling leftover change in casino slot machines. A correspondent for London’s the Sun gained the trust of a few and even photographed their “apartments” for a September dispatch, showing well-stocked quarters, with scrounged appliances and furniture and even one makeshift shower rigged from a water cooler. “Amy,” who has lived in the tunnels with her husband, “J.R.,” for two years, said she “love[s]” the Vegas lifestyle and appears in no hurry to leave her setup. “Kathryn” (who lives with boyfriend “Steven”) also appears content except, she says, for the fragrance, the black widow spiders, and the periodic rush of water through their home (threatening any “valuables” not stacked on crates).

Continue reading “News of the Weird“

Bookmark It

LEAD STORY: World-Class Adolescent Endeavors: Japanese engineer Takuo Toda’s paper airplane was certified in May as the Guinness Book record-holder for the longest flight from a single folded sheet of paper: 27.9 seconds. And in Witcham, England, in July, Jim Collins won the World Peashooting Championship, using a “traditional” instrument blowing at a target 12 yards away, but noncompeting ex-champion George Hollis once again drew the most attention with his homemade, gyroscopic-balancing, laser-guided peashooter, with which he won three previous championships.

Continue reading News of the Weird

Bookmark It

LEAD STORY: Unconventional Medicine: British construction worker Martin Jones, 42, who lost one eye and was blinded in the other in a 1997 explosion, regained his sight this year as a result of surgery in which part of his tooth was implanted in the eye. Dr. Christopher Liu of the Sussex Eye Clinic used a piece of tooth because a “living anchor” was necessary to hold a patch of Jones’ skin underneath his eyelid, to generate blood supply while a new lens formed. When the lens was healthy enough, Liu made a hole in the cornea for light to pass, and Jones feasted his eye on his wife, whom he had married four years ago, sight unseen.

Continue reading News of the Weird

Bookmark It

LEAD STORY: Scientology trains its leaders a good deal more aggressively than other religions do, judging by the revelations by four former church officials to the St. Petersburg Times in June. In an exercise concocted by founder L. Ron Hubbard, leaders who screw up are taken out to sea and forced off a gangplank with the admonition, “We commit your sins and errors to the deep and trust you will rise a better Thetan [immortal spiritual being].” The rituals can also take place in a cold swimming pool, with the transgressors in business suits. Also, to test leaders’ commitment, the head Scientologist, with a boombox, conducts games of musical chairs to reward the last man sitting (using the music of Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody”: “Is this the real life? / Is this just fantasy? / Caught in a landslide / No escape from reality”).

Continue reading News of the Weird

Bookmark It

LEAD STORY: Americans Fantasize, Germans Act: Two formerly well-off retired couples in Speyer, Germany, whose nest egg was largely wiped out by investments in subprime Florida mortgages, vented their anger by kidnapping their investment adviser, James Amburn, in June. They took him to the vacation home of one of the couples near the Austrian border, bound him like a mummy and beat and tortured him over several days, fracturing two ribs, in repeated attempts to punish him and extort his own property as partial compensation for their losses. Police rescued him after he managed to send a coded message by fax.

Continue reading News of the Weird

Bookmark It

LEAD STORY: 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 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.

Continue reading News of the Weird

Bookmark It

LEAD STORY: Using GPS and state-of-the-art sonar, Columbia University researchers recently made the first comprehensive map of the wonders submerged in New York City’s harbors. Supplementing those findings with historical data, New York magazine reported the inventory’s highlights in May: a 350-foot steamship (downed in 1920), a freight train (derailed in 1865), 1,600 bars of silver (unrecovered since 1903), a fleet of Good Humor ice cream trucks (which form a reef for aquatic life), and so many junked cars near the Brooklyn and Manhattan bridges that divers use them as underwater navigation points. Of most concern lately, though, are the wildlife: 4-foot-long worms that eat wooden docks and tiny “gribbles” that eat concrete pilings.

Continue reading News of the Weird

Bookmark It

LEAD STORY: Competitive Facial Hair: At the biennial World Beard and Moustache Championships in May in Anchorage, Alaska, four local heroes “defeated” the usually dominant German contingent in the 18-category pageant, including overall champ David Traver of Girdwood, Alaska, whose woven chin hair suggests a long potholder. Said Traver, of the Germans, “They were humble, and you have to respect that.” One defending champ, Jack Passion of Los Angeles, fell short with his navel-length red hair, despite having authored The Facial Hair Handbook after his 2007 victory. Traver acknowledged that no money was at stake (only trophies and “bragging rights”), but added that there are “a lot of ladies” who fawn over men’s facial hair. “Seriously, they exist.”

Continue reading News of the Weird

Bookmark It

LEAD STORY: Convicted Oklahoma City bombing conspirator Terry Nichols, now serving a life sentence in the Florence, Colo., “Supermax” prison, filed a 39-page federal lawsuit in March alleging unconstitutional “cruel and unusual punishment” because the refined-food, low-fiber meals give him “chronic constipation [and] bleeding hemorrhoids.” He demanded fresh, raw vegetables and other high-fiber foods, necessary to “keep one’s body (i.e., God’s holy temple) in good health.” Nichols was joined in the lawsuit by fellow Supermax resident Eric Rudolph (the convicted abortion-clinic and Atlanta Olympics bomber), who claimed “gas and stomach cramps” and observed that “our bodies” are “sacred and should be treated as such.”

Continue reading News of the Weird.

Bookmark It

LEAD STORY: In April at a New York City gallery, the Australian performance artist Stelarc starred in a video of his surgery in which an ear is implanted into his left forearm (right now, just a prosthesis, but to which stem cells will be added), which will house an Internet-accessed, Bluetooth-capable microphone. “Post-evolutionary strategies” are required, Stelarc told the New York Times, because the current state of the body is obsolete. Other exhibits at the Corpus Extremus (LIFE+) exhibit included a genetically modified goat that produces super-strong spider’s silk. In an earlier project, Stelarc wired half his muscles to computers in Paris, Helsinki and Amsterdam, to understand a semi-controllable “split-body experience.” Stelarc’s self-appraisal: “[I'm] never in [my] comfort zone.”

Continue reading News of the Weird.

Bookmark It

LEAD STORY: The U.S. National Nuclear Security Administration recently postponed its crucial program to rejuvenate quarter-century-old Trident missile warheads because no one can remember how to make a key component of the weapons (codenamed “Fogbank”), according to a March 2 report of the Government Accountability Office. The GAO found that, despite concern over the bombs’ safety and reliability, NNSA could not replicate the manufacturing process because all knowledgeable personnel have left the agency and no written records were kept. Said one commentator, “This is like James Bond destroying his instructions as soon as he’s read them.” (The GAO report came two months after the German Interior Ministry reported to Parliament that over a 10-year period, it had lost 332 secret files that were in fact so secret that no one in the Ministry could recall what was in them.)

Continue reading News of the Weird.

Bookmark It

LEAD STORY: Through the years, News of the Weird has reported on restaurants around the world with singularly quirky themes and signature dishes, such as the one in Kaohsiung, Taiwan, that seats all diners on toilets and the Beijing restaurant whose cuisine features animal penises. Last year, a group of doctors in Riga, Latvia, opened Hospitalis, a medical-themed restaurant whose dining room resembles an OR, with “nurse” waitresses bringing food on gurneys, accessorized with syringes and forceps in addition to knives and forks and with drinks served in beakers and test tubes. Hospitalis’ signature dish is a cake with edible toppings that resemble fingers, noses and tongues.

Continue reading the latest News of the Weird.

Bookmark It

LEAD STORY: Canadian filmmaker Rob Spence said recently that he would install a prosthetic eye with a camera and wireless transmitter (of the size now used for colonoscopies) into the socket from which one of his eyes had been removed as the result of a childhood accident. He hopes to control the prosthetic eye in the same way that his muscles control his good eye, to record what his eyes see, and his first project will be a documentary on people’s attitudes about privacy in an “Orwellian society.” Says Spence: The “best way to make a connection [with an interviewee] is through eye contact. … When you bring in a camera, people change.”

Continue reading News of the Weird.

Bookmark It

LEAD STORY: A 1970s-style San Francisco commune is organized around the practice of “orgasmic meditation,” but for women only, in daily sessions that start promptly at 7 a.m. Men belong to the commune, too, but are useful only digitally to the women and must remain clothed, according to a March report in the New York Times. The founder of the One Taste Urban Retreat Center, Nicole Daedone, 41, is considered by some former members to be running a “cult,” because of her dominant personality and ability to play on the vulnerabilities of her members, but the three dozen now in residence seem to admire her vision. One man said, according to the Times, that he had improved his own concentration at work (as a Silicon Valley engineer) through “the practice of manually fixing his attention on a tiny spot of a woman’s body.”
Continue reading News of the Weird.

Bookmark It

LEAD STORY: When Alcoa Inc. prepared to build an aluminum smelting plant in Iceland in 2004, the government forced it to hire an expert to assure that none of the country’s legendary “hidden people” lived underneath the property. The elf-like goblins provoke genuine apprehensiveness in many of the country’s 300,000 natives (who are all, reputedly, related by blood). An Alcoa spokesman told Vanity Fair writer Michael Lewis (for an April 2009 report) that the inspection, which delayed construction for six months, was costly but necessary: “[W]e couldn’t be in the position of acknowledging the existence of hidden people.” (Lewis offered several explanations for the country’s spectacular financial implosion in 2008, including Icelanders’ incomprehensible superiority complex that convinced many lifelong fishermen that they were gifted investment bankers.)

Continue reading News of the Weird.

Bookmark It

LEAD STORY: Americans’ Special Relationship with “Taxes”: It is not just that the secretary of the Treasury owed back taxes for years, or that two other presidential Cabinet-level nominees owed back taxes. In January, federal prosecutors revealed that District of Columbia Councilman Marion Barry, who was already on probation after a 2005 conviction for failing to file tax returns for the years 1999 through 2004, and subsequently almost tauntingly failed to file a return for 2006, has now doubled-down the taunt by failing to file for 2007. And in March, a Georgia state senator proposed punishment for the 22 members of the Legislature who either owed back taxes or had failed to file returns for at least one year since 2002. The 22 were not identified, in compliance with privacy laws, but the Senate’s Democratic leader, Robert Brown, outed himself as one of the 22 in the course of calling his scolding colleague a “bloodsucker.”

Continue reading News of the Weird.

Bookmark It

LEAD STORY: Americans’ Special Relationship with “Taxes”: It is not just that the secretary of the Treasury owed back taxes for years, or that two other presidential Cabinet-level nominees owed back taxes. In January, federal prosecutors revealed that District of Columbia Councilman Marion Barry, who was already on probation after a 2005 conviction for failing to file tax returns for the years 1999 through 2004, and subsequently almost tauntingly failed to file a return for 2006, has now doubled-down the taunt by failing to file for 2007. And in March, a Georgia state senator proposed punishment for the 22 members of the Legislature who either owed back taxes or had failed to file returns for at least one year since 2002. The 22 were not identified, in compliance with privacy laws, but the Senate’s Democratic leader, Robert Brown, outed himself as one of the 22 in the course of calling his scolding colleague a “bloodsucker.”

Continue reading News of the Weird

Bookmark It

LEAD STORY: University of California researchers, on a
Pentagon contract, announced in January success at rigging a live
flower beetle with electrodes and a radio receiver to enable scientists
to control the insect’s flight remotely. Pulses sent to the bug’s
muscles or optic lobes can command it to take off, turn left or right,
or hover, according to a report in MIT’s Technology Review,
and the insect’s “large” size (up to a whopping 4 inches in length)
would enable it to also carry a camera, giving the beetle military uses
such as surveillance or search and rescue. The researchers admired the
native flight-control ability of the beetle so much that they abandoned
developing robot beetles (which required trying to mimic nature).

Continue reading News of the Weird.

Bookmark It

LEAD STORY: Belgian workers take sick leave nearly four times as often as U.S. workers, mostly attributed to Belgian law, which grants full salary the first month and then government-guaranteed 80 percent pay indefinitely. A recent study, noted in a January Wall Street Journal report, found that only 5 percent of Belgian leave-takers were proven malingerers, but that the biggest medical problem now is easily diagnosed “depression” (exacerbated by the worsening economy), leading to free-form medical leave-taking and creative treatments often unchallenged, such as for the man who frolicked on the soccer field, bought an Alfa Romeo, and reconnected with old friends (all of which, said his doctor, lessened his depression).

Continue reading News of the Weird.

Bookmark It

LEAD STORY: Though India is recognized as a world leader in promoting the health benefits of urine, its dominance will be assured by the end of the year when a cow-urine-based soft drink comes to market. Om Prakash, chief of the Cow Protection Department of the RSS organization (India’s largest Hindu nationalist group), trying to reassure a Times of London reporter in February, promised, “It won’t smell like urine and will be tasty, too,” noting that medicinal herbs would be added and toxins removed. In addition to improved health, he said, India needs a domestic (and especially Hindu) beverage to compete with the foreign influence of Coca-Cola and Pepsi.

Read more News of the Weird.

Bookmark It

LEAD STORY: One Industry That Needs No Stimulus: 1) Drug officials in California’s Mendocino, Humboldt and Trinity counties (north of San Francisco) estimated in January that two-thirds of the area’s economy is based on probably illegal marijuana farming (illegal under federal law, but permitted for medical use by the state). One federal agent told MSNBC, “Nobody produces any better marijuana than [they] do right here.” 2) In January, the director of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime acknowledged that during the bleak banking days of September and October 2008, with panic in the economy over the shortage of cash, often the main source available to some banks was drug dealers’ steady deposits of money to be laundered.

Read more News of the Weird.

Bookmark It

LEAD STORY: Poetry on the Rise: 1) Twelve local poets jumped into the frigid Green Lake in Seattle in December, just because they thought it would be a good way to publicize their art. “It’s not enough to write,” said one. “You need that audience.” 2) The Ontario Court of Appeal overturned the conviction of Antonio Batista in November, declaring that his “death threat” against a Mississauga City Council member, in the form of a sonnet on long-neglected potholes, was more likely literary expression. 3) Jose Gouveia, 45, recently published Rubber Side Down, a book of poems by bikers about the open road (including 17-syllable “baiku”), some from the educationally upscale Highway Poets Motor Cycle Club of Cambridge, Mass.

Read more News of the Weird.

Bookmark It

LEAD STORY: Saudi Arabia is host to several camel beauty pageants each year (condemned as religiously fatuous by Muslim clerics), but the country’s first goat beauty pageant was held in September in Riyadh, with the distinctive Najdi breed — featuring high nose bridges and silky, shaggy hair — taking top prizes. In fact, most of the goats in the competition had the same father, Burgan, whose progeny typically fetch the equivalent of $25,000 and up. Still, prize-winning show camels can bring 10 times that amount for the greater status they convey to their owners. Burgan himself did not appear at the pageant, according to a Reuters dispatch, because his owner feared that a jealous competitor would have an “evil eye” cast upon him.

Read more News of the Weird.

Bookmark It

LEAD STORY: They’re either earnestly civic-minded or people with issues, but in several dozen cities across the country, men (and a few women) dress in homemade superhero costumes and patrol marginal neighborhoods, aiming to deter crime. Phoenix’s Green Scorpion and New York City’s Terrifica and Orlando’s Master Legend and Indianapolis’ Mr. Silent are just a few of the 200 gunless, knifeless vigilantes listed on the World Superhero Registry, most presumably with day jobs but who fancy cleaning up the mean streets at night. According to two recent reports (in Rolling Stone and the Times of London), unanticipated gripes by the “Reals,” as they call themselves, are boredom from lack of crime and (especially in the summer) itchy spandex outfits.

Read more from News of the Weird.

Bookmark It

LEAD STORY: “Genetic modification” sounds like frighteningly complicated lab work, but amateurs are routinely doing it in garages and dining rooms across the country, according to a December Associated Press report. Hobbyists (some terming themselves “biohackers”) are busy creating new life forms and someday, observers say, may turn up a cure for cancer or an accidental environmental catastrophe. The community lab DIYbio in Cambridge, Mass., has patrons who typically work on vaccines and biofuels, but might also whimsically create tattoos that glow. One amateur bought jellyfish DNA containing a green fluorescent protein (for about $100), and built a DNA analyzer (less than $25) so she could alter yogurt bacteria to glow green when it detects melamine (the substance recently discovered in deadly Chinese baby formula and pet food).

Read more News of the Weird.

Bookmark It