xxxNews Of The Weirdxxx
Bizarre but true stories about real people collected by syndicated columnist Chuck Shepherd.
Windsor, Ontario, hair stylist Waddah (Martin) Mustapha was awarded the equivalent of about US$270,000 by a court in April after he testified that he became racked with depression upon seeing a fly inside a commercial bottle of water at his salon. Presumably, damages would have been more if Mustapha had actually drunk from the bottle (or even opened it). As it was, he and his wife vomited, and he required extensive psychotherapy for nightmares, loss of sense of humor, increased argumentativeness, lack of desire to shower regularly, and constipation.
In April, Laura and Edmund Gerstein of Boca Raton, Fla., who want to save their beloved backyard grapefruit tree from the state’s citrus canker eradication program, formally claimed immunity for the tree under a provision in the 1949 Geneva Conventions. The Gersteins pointed to a paragraph on protecting crops needed for civilians’ survival during wartime, in that, said Edmund, “As I understand it, (the U.S.) is in a state of war.” (Responded a state Department of Agriculture spokesman, “That tree will be coming down.”)
An arbitration panel in April issued a two-year suspension to champion cyclist Tyler Hamilton for having transfused another person’s blood for a race in Spain last year. At the panel’s hearing in March, according to an April New York Times story, Hamilton and his lawyers had denied the charge and raised the possibility that maybe Hamilton had a “vanishing twin” who had shared the womb with him during his first trimester, which would account for why he wound up with some blood that doesn’t match his “other” blood.
(Send your Weird News to Chuck Shepherd, P.O. Box 18737, Tampa FL 33679 or [email protected] or go to www.NewsoftheWeird.com.) NEWS OF THE WEIRD