xxxNews Of The Weirdxxx
Bizarre but true stories about real people collected by syndicated columnist Chuck Shepherd.
Adding to the list of stories that were formerly weird but which now occur with such frequency that they must be retired from circulation:
–(61) Parent(s) who leave young children home alone for days at a time, certain that they can care for themselves, while they frolic, as a 31-year-old Placentia, Calif., woman did in December, leaving her kids, ages 7 and 4, for three weeks to go see a North Carolina man she had met on the Internet.
–(62) And men who steal industrial (slow-moving) vehicles and apparently try to outrun pursuing police cars, as a 29-year-old man did in February with a farm tractor (towing an 18-foot-wide chisel plow), piddling along for 20 miles from near Wheaton, Minn., into South Dakota, “chased” by sheriff’s deputies until he finally crashed.
New Salem Missionary Baptist Church members voted 67-10 to fire pastor Stanley Hall, who had refused to reschedule his consecration service even though it conflicted with the telecast of the Super Bowl (Birmingham, Ala.).
Israeli Aircraft Industries Ltd. is now testing an “airplane” the size of a credit card (flight time: 20 minutes), containing cameras and transmitters to relay intelligence from battlefields, or from the insides of buildings by going through open windows.
The company TrapTec (Escondido, Calif.) is now in the final testing of “anti-graffiti” sensors that are so responsive that they can identify taggers who use spray paint just by the distinctive hissing sound of the aerosol can (and automatically tell police the taggers’ location, via global positioning system technology).
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