xxxNews Of The Weirdxxx
Bizarre but true stories about real people collected by syndicated columnist Chuck Shepherd.
A New York Daily News investigation revealed in March that the Postal Service has spent at least $3.6 million of stamp buyers’ money in recent years sending its Inspector General staff through a series of executive conferences that featured exercises in wrapping each other in toilet paper and aluminum foil, building sand castles in freezing weather at the beach, and freely making animal noises, all because the conference sponsors convinced Inspector General Karla Corcoran that those exercises would improve job performance and make the staff work together better. Other therapeutic tasks included dressing in cat costumes and asking make-believe wizards for advice.
From a New Orleans Times-Picayune obituary that contains no explanation: “Eric D. ‘Big Head’ Vicks, a laborer, died Jan. 20 of a head injury.”
A 36-year-old man from Arcadia, Fla., checked himself into a counseling clinic in March after being identified as the one who had been pretending in public to be choking on food and persuading women to grasp him in the Heimlich maneuver, after which he would hug them lavishly and attempt clumsily to develop a relationship. A sheriff’s spokesman in Charlotte County, site of the most recent reports, said the man probably had done nothing illegal. (Novelist Chuck Palahniuk, author of “Fight Club,” recently published “Choke,” whose storyline roughly matches the man’s actions, but apparently some Florida incidents predated the book’s publication.
Hillside Cemetery received a bill in the mail from the phone company addressed to one of its “residents” (buried, 1997) for a call he supposedly made early this year (Auburn, Mass.).
Three men fell to their deaths into a 40-foot latrine pit in Mombasa, Kenya, in March, all because the first man chivalrously climbed down a ladder into the pit to retrieve a woman’s cell phone but fell off and suffocated. The other two men then climbed down, but also fell off, attempting to rescue the one before him. A search crew finally brought up the three bodies four hours later, but no cell phone.
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