xxxNews Of The Weirdxxx
Bizarre but true stories about real people collected by syndicated columnist Chuck Shepherd.
New York University professor Steven Brams and colleagues developed a nuanced political-economic theory for efficiently dividing a cake among dessert lovers who insist on getting their fair shares.
In January, in Florida’s first election using all touch-screen balloting (following the state’s 2000 presidential fiasco), Ellyn Bogdanoff won a special election for a state House seat from Broward County by 12 votes out of about 10,000 cast, but the losing candidate was considering a challenge over the 134 “voters” who had gone into the booths but for whom no votes were registered. (By the way, in January in San Antonio, Texas, Chad Allen Tolleson was arrested for burglarizing a store by climbing in through a ventilation duct; however, he got stuck, and early-arriving employees who found him dangling from the ceiling now refer to him as “Hanging Chad.”)
Over a two-month period in the American Indian Miskito community of northern Nicaragua, about 150 people contracted a hysteria whose symptoms included wandering naked in public, becoming severely violent, fighting imaginary enemies, and, later, lapsing into comalike states. Nicaraguan officials regard the illness, “grisi siknis,” as culture-bound, with traditional healers more effective at treating it than medical doctors (in contrast to affluent societies’ culture-bound illnesses, such as anorexia nervosa, which are often treated medically).
As an example of the stunning heritage of honesty of the Japanese, the Tokyo police’s Lost and Found Center reported that the equivalent of US$23 million in cash found by strangers was turned in in 2002 (and almost $17 million eventually made it back to the rightful owners). Also, reported The New York Times in January, 330,000 umbrellas were turned in (but fewer than 1,000 were claimed).
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