xxxNews Of The Weirdxxx
Bizarre but true stories about real people collected by syndicated columnist Chuck Shepherd.
In Their Own Words:
–Singer Kenny Chesney, explaining to Life magazine in October how profoundly he felt the loss when he and actress Renee Zellweger ended their recent, brief marriage: It was “like opening the door to your house and having someone come in and take your big-screen TV off the wall during the big game, and there’s nothing you can do about it.”
Kelley Borland of Evans, Colo., who in September received a $100 ransom demand for the return of his missing dog, authenticated by what was supposedly a sample of the dog’s droppings: “It looked like my dog’s poop, but I’m not a dog poop expert.”
“Cargo cults” have made News of the Weird several times in this column’s 17 years and still flourish in Papua New Guinea, whose police arrested 320 cultists recently for practicing sorcery. (The cults typically believe that Western products, brought by missionaries before World War II, are gifts from God, and they even worshipped the airstrips on which the goods-bearing planes landed.) A female leader of one of the groups involved in the recent arrests said she “found strange teachings about women and their monthly period” in the Bible’s book of Leviticus. The leaders concluded that menstrual blood was sacred water that let them see “invisible things,” according to a Reuters report quoting The National, a newspaper in Boroko.
(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