xxxNews Of The Weirdxxx
Bizarre but true stories about real people collected by syndicated columnist Chuck Shepherd.
In August, computer technician Goran Andervass received the equivalent of US$100,000 as settlement of his wrongful-firing lawsuit against Riksbanken, the Swedish national bank, over a 2001 incident that began when a colleague, meeting with him in his Stockholm office, ostentatiously passed gas. Andervass became very upset and started shouting at the man. Supervisors cautioned Andervass, who began a downward emotional spiral and began to take abundant sick leave, leading to further sanctions and eventually to his dismissal.
Among the 15 “worst” actual jobs in science (from the October issue of Popular Science): (15) counting fish (one by one, for hours) that swim by dams in the Pacific Northwest; (11) the only two government bureaucrats whose job is to convince Americans of the merits of the metric system; (7) researchers who reach into a cow’s rumen to pull out and analyze the stomach contents; (4) mosquito catchers who endure up to 15 bites a minute on three-hour shifts and hope not to get malaria; (3) researchers who extract sperm from animals for study or artificial insemination (and extracting from a pig is much preferable to extracting from a bull); and (1) “flatus odor judges” working for gastroenterologist Michael Levitt, who feeds subjects pinto beans, then gathers gases in plastic collection tubes direct from the source, and then has judges sniff as many as 100 samples, rating them for strength.
Cyril Kendall was easily convicted in August in New York City for swindling the American Red Cross and another organization out of $160,000 for family grief counseling over a “son” who “died” in the World Trade Center attack. There are no official records that the son ever existed, although Kendall presented some documents that government experts termed poor forgeries. The grief counseling ($425 an hour) was spent entirely at a “company” that did not exist but of which Kendall admitted that he was the sole employee (thus paying himself to counsel himself and his family).
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