xxxNews Of The Weirdxxx
Bizarre but true stories about real people collected by syndicated columnist Chuck Shepherd.
Almost All True:
Three of these four things really happened, just recently. Are you cynical enough to figure out the made-up story?
(a) A British couple who hadn’t been able to break their two-pack-a-day cigarette habit gave it up when their pet parrot developed a respiratory illness.
(b) A leading British museum announced an experiment to cover a substantial portion of its utility expenses by converting visitors’ excrement from museum rest rooms into electricity.
(c) A local Islamic extremist organization in France, with ties to al-Qaeda, filed several lawsuits against the city of Paris for what it called “discriminatory tax harassment.”
(d) Meteorological officials in one Chinese province accused their counterparts in another province of “stealing” “their” clouds, in order to seed them for rain.
Answer: (c) is not true.
In a June profile of Britain’s Prince Charles, a columnist for The Guardian newspaper describes, as an example of his increasing isolation from the mainstream of under-age-65 British society, his recent encouragement of people to avoid college and accept learning vocational skills and his enthusiastic promotion of the Gerson Therapy, a widely discredited treatment for cancer patients diagnosed as terminally ill. Among the tenets of the Gerson regimen (which costs $15,000 for three weeks): drinking 20 pounds of liquified fruit and vegetables per day (specially prepared on a “noncentrifugal” juicer that costs $2,000) and taking daily coffee enemas.
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
