xxxNews Of The Weirdxxx
Bizarre but true stories about real people collected by syndicated columnist Chuck Shepherd.
George Duncan was finally fired by the New York Department of Corrections in November, after having taken 744 “sick” days in 15 years (for spikes of high blood pressure), none of which were ever authenticated by doctors examining Duncan afterward.
The city of Vicksburg, Miss., took a step to alleviate a problem with employees’ illnesses: Henceforth, city workers will be expected to give 48 hours’ notice before taking sick days.
A 41-year-old California mayor who was cited for having illegally tinted car windows filed a complaint against the ticketing officer for continually referring to him as “dude” (Arvin, Calif.).
In a November report, The New York Times revealed that the highly touted Houston school district (praised as exemplary by President Bush and the district’s former superintendent Rod Paige, who is now U.S. secretary of education) used apparently highly stylized statistics to show its widely admired low dropout rates and campus crime rates. A subsequent school district audit found that “thousands” of dropouts had been left out of the earlier record, and the Times further found that the district’s principals had reported only 761 campus assaults in four years while the schools’ own police officers reported 3,091.
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
