xxxNews Of The Weirdxxx

Bizarre but true stories about real people collected by syndicated columnist Chuck Shepherd.

Editor Frank Kelly Rich’s bimonthly tribute to overdrinking — the magazine Modern Drunkard — is a 50,000-circulation glossy “about drinking and only about drinking, and not just drinking, but heavy drinking,” he told the Los Angeles Times in January. Recent features included biographies of great drunks, a dictionary of bar slang, and a testimonial on how drinking cured one man’s fear of flying. “The most accomplished people,” Rich said, “have been drinkers,” and he implied that people in the Middle East ought to drink more. Calling serious drinkers an “oppressed minority,” Rich said he himself has about eight drinks a day, sometimes up to 30 (when he frequently blacks out). Said Rich’s wife, of her husband’s career, “When you find your calling, you have to go with it.”

Austrian artist Muhammad Mueller started a project in November, as political commentary, in which two people at a time dig a tunnel from the city of Graz to Gradec, Slovenia, 42 miles away, using only shovels; he estimated the venture would take 5,600 years.

In July, a federal appeals court rejected the Environmental Protection Agency’s leak-safety standards for the long-awaited nuclear waste repository at Nevada’s Yucca Mountain; EPA had found the proposed site safe until the year 12,000 A.D., but the court said that wasn’t long enough (and noted that one National Academy of Sciences report recommended protection until the year 302,000 A.D.)
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