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Recurring Themes

Accidents that leave victims relatively normal but with severely heightened sexual desires have been mentioned several times in News of the Weird, back to a 1978 collision with a Pepsi truck that, according to a jury in Detroit, left a man with a spontaneous, intense desire to become a woman. In 2002, motorcyclist Kunal Lindsay […]

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Government in Action!

In April, Britain’s Office of Work and Pensions acknowledged to the Daily Mail that the multiple wives of polygamous husbands who are legally in the country routinely draw dependents’ unemployment allowances from the government (even though polygamy itself is illegal in the U.K.). A single person receives the equivalent of about $120 a week, and […]

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Great Art!

The Horror of War: A U.S. law professor representing Guantanamo prisoners compiled a book of poems by some of the detainees, to be published this month by University of Iowa Press and featuring a cover blurb by former U.S. poet laureate Robert Pinsky. Among the verses, for example, by Sami al Haj, quoted in a […]

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Police Report

James Coldwell, 49, was arrested in Manchester, N.H., in July and charged as the man who robbed a Citizen Bank branch dressed as a tree (branches duct-taped to his body and head, obscuring much of his face, though he was still identified from the security camera). A prosecutor in Chelsea, Vt., refused in June to […]

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Thinning the Herd

A burglar was killed trying to sneak into the Maranatha Used Clothing store in Miami on May 31; police said the man had crawled between the blades of a large, idle ventilation fan but that before getting all the way through, he accidentally tripped the “on” switch. In Forst, Germany, in May, as a 43-year-old […]

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Yikes!

In June, Pfc. Duncan Schneider finished training with his Oregon Army National Guard unit, immediately married his longtime girlfriend, and prepared for deployment to Iraq; the marriage means that Schneider’s unit’s first sergeant is now his mother-in-law. Officials at the Masters games in Milan, Italy, in July announced in advance that, since the invited athletes […]

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Feuds

Hiroshi Nishizaki, 46, was arrested in Osaka, Japan, in May and accused of causing damage of the equivalent of about $5,500 by pouring urine on a neighbor’s house on 169 occasions, because it was blocking Nishizaki’s view. Wheaton, Ill., lawyer Donald Ramsell sued Geneva, Ill., lawyer Douglas Warlick in June, demanding that Warlick continue to […]

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The Continuing Crisis

Widower Charlie Bonn Kemp, 77, of Vero Beach, Fla., took especially hard the loss of his wife, Lee, in 2006 because she was unquestionably the love of his life even though the couple stopped having sex even before they got married in 1978, according to a June St. Petersburg Times profile. Lee had been Charlie’s […]

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Oops!

A toddler broke from his mother’s supervision in May at the Rhime Buddhist Center in Kansas City, Mo., and accidentally trampled the meticulously created colored-sand picture that eight monks had to that point spent two days creating, but the monks impressively responded with patience. “No problem,” said one, from India’s Geshe Lobsang Sumdup monastery. We […]

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Fine Points of the Law

The New Zealand Herald reported in June that a prostitute may be eligible for worker’s compensation based on her having been injured when the car in which she was riding plunged down a hillside. Because the driver was a john who was taking her to a site he had chosen for their encounter, the Prostitutes […]

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