Weird News

Got bored at work today so I decided to surf the web and stumbled upon News of the Weird. This is a site of a great collection of funny/odd true news stories. Go check out the site... but in the mean time here are a few of my favorite stories that I read on the site. (And by a few I mean 14)

• Filing a lawsuit in Santa Ana, Calif., in May, Jinsoo Kim said he had a valid contract in which Stephen Son promised to repay the $170,000 that Kim had invested in Son's Korean corporation, especially considering that the promise was written entirely with Son's blood. [KCAL-TV-AP (Los Angeles), 5-30-06]
• Police in Groningen, Netherlands, announced that a 40-year-old man whom they had previously counseled had once again resumed his compulsion to rummage through garbage seeking discarded tampons (and leaving notes for the discarders) [Expatica.com (Amsterdam), 7-11-06]
• On July 18 (five days after Israel began its retaliatory assault on Hezbollah), swimmer Hilary Bramwill, 30, was picked up by rescuers a mile off a New York beach, despite her insistence that she needed to get to Israel.[New York Daily News, 7-19-06]
• Randall Roye, whom New York City government lawyers say entered the country illegally in the 1990s and assumed the identity of a dead man, nonetheless tried to sue the city for $20 million after he allegedly "fell" out of a first-floor window of a school building. (With his cover blown, he has dropped out of sight, according to a June New York Post story.) [New York Post, 6-5-06]
• Daughter Carriel Louah, 25, is suing her parents for at least $75,000 for the broken ankle she suffered in a fall on their property when she paid them an unexpected visit in Darlington, Wis., in 2005. The mother said she appreciated the surprise birthday visit, but denied any negligence. (A judge refused to toss out the lawsuit in July.) [WISC-TV (Madison, Wis.), 7-13-06]
• In June, the Ministry of Higher Education of Saudi Arabia (home of 15 of the 19 Sept. 11 hijackers), along with the country's civil aviation authority, jointly announced scholarships for Saudi men and women for bachelor's and graduate-school study in the United States in such fields as "air traffic control," "flight safety" and "other majors related to the airline transport industry." [Arab News, 6-20-06]
• Marine veteran Christopher Marlowe, 25, was arrested in New Orleans in June and charged with shooting Army veteran Erik Beelman after an argument over which branch of service is tougher. [Times-Picayune (New Orleans), 6-28-06]
• Pamela Majdan, 23, was charged with domestic battery in Wood Dale, Ill., on Memorial Day after allegedly repeatedly beating her sister, Joyce, 31, in a dispute over who had caught the most pieces of candy tossed during the town's holiday parade. [Daily Herald (Arlington Heights, Ill.), 5-31-06]
• Also in June, Delaware governor Ruth Ann Minner complained that Homeland Security's secret telephone hotline to governors, intended for emergency communication, was often tied up by telemarketers, and recommended that the department enter the number onto the government's Do Not Call registry. [USA Today, 6-15-06]
• From the May 25 Washington Post Crime Report: "10:55 p.m. May 8. A man directed a driver into a parking space, then grabbed her when she got out of the car. He said, 'I'm not going to hurt you. You're a unique person, and I'm a unique person.' He put a ring on her right index finger and started to chant, then took property from her pocket and fled on foot." [Washington Post, 5-25-06]
• In June, another client who did her own lawyering, eccentric Susan Polk, was convicted of murdering her husband, after a long trial in Martinez, Calif., in which she spent two weeks on the witness stand as both questioner and witness (and in a judge-allowed departure, as her deep-voiced husband, as she re-created their conversations). Polk also told the jury that she is psychic, that she called the Sept. 11 attacks in advance, that her husband was an Israeli intelligence agent, that she once foiled an assassination attempt on the pope, and that Colin Powell is the Antichrist. [San Francisco Chronicle, 5-18-06; New York Times, 6-17-06]
• Jonifer Jackson, 20, was arrested in Clarksville, Tenn., in April and charged with reckless endangerment for firing a 9 mm pistol while street-preaching (because, he told police, it was the only way he could get people to listen to him). [WSMV-TV (Nashville)-AP, 4-3-06]
• Yasuhisa Matsushita, 25, was arrested in Iwata, Japan, in March as the man who stole a high school girl's swimsuit, put it on, and pranced around in it while relieving himself because, he told police, "(I)t felt so good." [Mainichi Daily News, 3-4-06]
• From an Atlanta police report, summarized in a July issue of the weekly Creative Loafing: A man working on a house on Smith Street was taken to Grady Memorial Hospital with serious injuries to his posterior. He happened to be bending over next to a wall that, unknown to him, a worker on the other side was drilling into, and the drill bit entered his "anal cavity." [Creative Loafing (Atlanta), 7-5-06]