xxxNews Of The Weirdxxx

Bizarre but true stories about real people collected by syndicated columnist Chuck Shepherd.

High school senior Brian Delekta filed a lawsuit in February against the school system in Memphis, Mich., alleging that he actually did A-plus work in one course but only received an A for it, and that his average should be even higher than it is (and Delekta was ranked first in his class by the end of his junior year). The course at issue here is a “work experience” course in which he served as a paralegal in a law office and did a fine job, according to his supervisor. That supervisor happened to be his mother, Diane, who said she meant that he did A-plus, not A, work.

The 3rd Baron Mereworth and dozens of British nobles told reporters in January that they planned to sue Britain in the European Court of Human Rights because the Blair government had ousted most of them in a 1997 reform of the “upper” legislature, the House of Lords (which had long been criticized as a mere social club of aristocrats). (Lord Mereworth, for example, inherited his title last year upon the death of his father, who spent 70 years in the House of Lords without ever participating in a debate.)

In her Daily Telegraph (London) column of Jan. 16, Medical Editor Celia Hall reported that a family doctor in western England has been summoned to a formal hearing before his local primary-care trust because he refused to certify a male patient for a Pap smear to screen him for cervical cancer. The man sincerely believes he is a hermaphrodite, but his doctor said he can find no evidence of that (and in fact, the man once fathered a child). At least one colleague suggested appeasing the patient, which the doctor said he might do if someone would teach him the procedure for performing a cervical smear on a 34-year-old male.

Kenneth Patrick Porche Jr., 22, was arrested outside the ladies’ room at Dillard’s department store in Houma, La., in January, carrying four plastic bags of urine and several empty bags labeled with descriptions such as “old woman.” Police said they believed that Porche would enter a stall, disable the toilet’s flush mechanism, and line the bowl with a plastic film to catch the urine, before hiding away in an adjacent stall. After a woman used the toilet and left, Porche would collect and bag the urine from the plastic film. Since Porche’s behavior was difficult to characterize, police charged him under the catch-all “criminal mischief.”
Send your Weird News to Chuck Shepherd, P.O. Box 18737, Tampa, Fla. 33679 or [email protected]
Copyright © 2001 by Chuck Shepherd

NEWS OF THE WEIRD