xxxNews Of The Weirdxxx
Bizarre but true stories about real people collected by syndicated columnist Chuck Shepherd.
In Brentwood, N.H., on July 30, police responded to an emergency call to find an intoxicated man with a padlock around his scrotum. He was taken to Exeter Hospital, and a locksmith freed him.
The day before that, in Worcester, England, Geoffrey Hughes, 51, was given a two-year “anti-social behavior order” in Magistrates Court for a series of incidents, one of which was appearing in public wearing only a hat and, on his scrotum, a padlock.
For a six-month period four years ago, government scientists in Florida studied a “miracle” liquid called “Celestial Drops” as a cure for the canker menace that ravages the state’s citrus crops. According to a July report by the Orlando Sentinel, the research was recommended by then-secretary of state Katherine Harris, who later said she had learned of Celestial Drops from New York rabbi Abe Hardoon, who is associated with the popularized version of Kabbalah, whose organizers sell its followers ordinary water that is supposedly “blessed” by being stored in a room with sacred texts. Celestial Drops, which was promoted as having “improved fractal design,” “infinite levels of order” and “high energy and low entropy,” was ultimately revealed by the scientists to also be water.
In May, a Philadelphia Daily News columnist described a cattle-call-type ritual at the local airport Sheraton hotel, by which most of the candidates for the city’s judgeships in that month’s Democratic primary shuffled into a room and offered checks of $1,000 or $2,000 to each of the city’s ward leaders for “election day expenses,” with each leader accepting the checks of those he would support. At a similar gathering at the Ritz-Carlton, one candidate said, “I thought to myself, ‘What if we all just walked out. Refused to pay.’ But none of us had the courage.”
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