xxxNews Of The Weirdxxx
Bizarre but true stories about real people collected by syndicated columnist Chuck Shepherd.
The Thames Water company succeeded in pressuring artist Mark McGowan to abandon his project at the House Gallery in south London in July in which, to protest society’s profligate use of water, he turned on House’s faucet and planned not to turn it off for a year (wasting an estimated 3.9 million gallons).
In Chicago, it was only a couple of days after photographer Kerry Skarbakka announced his “Falling” project that he was pressured into abandoning it. Skarbakka said he was awed by the sight of people falling or jumping from the World Trade Center on Sept. 11 and said he would, in tribute, repeatedly plunge four stories from Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art (but was quickly excoriated for poor taste).
Reuters reported in July that a court in Macerata, Italy, had scheduled Amelia Cuccioletti’s property-rights case for further proceedings at 9:30 a.m. on March 25, 2010. Cuccioletti is 98 years old. (The average civil case runs about eight years in Italy.)
In London in May, lawyer Nicholas Stadlen finally came to the end of his opening remarks for the defense in a creditors’ lawsuit against the failed BCCI bank. He spoke for 119 days and referred to files stacked so high that neither side’s lawyers could see each other. The plaintiff’s lawyer had taken only 73 days.
(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
