xxxNews Of The Weirdxxx
Bizarre but true stories about real people collected by syndicated columnist Chuck Shepherd.
The 223-page novel “The Train From Nowhere,” by a French writer using the name Michel Thaler, is reported to be the first novel in history with no verbs, and its May publication was met with damning reviews. “Thaler” has called the verb “like a weed in a field of flowers” and his book a “revolution in the history of literature,” that it “is to literature what the great Dada and Surrealist movements were to art.” Critics noted the book’s lack of action, in that it consists only of, according to London’s Daily Telegraph, “lengthy passages filled with florid adjectives in a series of vitriolic portraits of dislikable passengers on a train.”
A Quad City Times (Davenport, Iowa) columnist reported in September on a man who recently drove into his housing community at 10:30 p.m. to discover about 500 14-inch-high, ceramic-faced Ronald McDonald dolls neatly lined up in the middle of six streets, two to three feet apart, with no witnesses or explanation as to how they got there or why. The columnist, Bill Wundram, discovered only that the dolls were probably taken from the warehouse of a promotions company in nearby Camanche, Iowa, but is still stumped as to motive.
A 28-year-old robbery convict with a history of escape attempts tried to tunnel his way to freedom at the prison in Coimbra, Portugal, in June but was intercepted by officials after excavating about 6 feet. He still had 70 feet of tunnel to dig just to clear the building he was housed in, but a larger problem was that the man was apparently direction-challenged: His tunnel was pointed not toward the prison perimeter next to the building but toward a patio well inside the walls.
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