xxxNews Of The Weirdxxx
Bizarre but true stories about real people collected by syndicated columnist Chuck Shepherd. Justin Mitchell Oaks, 21, and his wife were miraculously uninjured after Oaks inadvertently drove their Toyota Corolla underneath an 18-wheeler on Interstate 10 in Tucson, Ariz., in April, got stuck, and was dragged 800 feet before the truck could stop. (Alcohol was not the problem here, either, but rather a cell-phone conversation.)
Christopher Lamping, 20 at the time, was arrested for DUI in Indiana, Pa., in March, after he leaned on the horn repeatedly through three light changes because the car in front of him would not go through the green lights. The car in front was a marked Indiana police cruiser whose officers were talking to a man on the sidewalk, and after hearing enough of Lamping’s horn, one officer walked over and noticed Lamping’s odor of alcohol. According to the Indiana Gazette story, Lamping later explained that he “just didn’t think of” driving around the stopped car.
Australian Jo Lapidge is the latest to offer a toilet training system for cats, according to a May Reuters dispatch. Her Litter-Kwitter is a four-step process to accustom the cat to relieve itself over a toilet bowl: (1) a red toilet-seat “disc” on top of cat litter; (2) the red-seat-and-litter device placed on top of the bowl requiring the cat to jump up to use it; (3) a yellow-seat disc without litter but with a small hole so that the water below is not prominent; and (4) a green-seat disc with a larger hole. Lapidge said it took eight weeks to train her cat, Doogal, even with his problem of climbing voluntarily into the bowl from time to time to play.
(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