xxxNews Of The Weirdxxx
Bizarre but true stories about real people collected by syndicated columnist Chuck Shepherd.
In April, Michael Theleman, 45, finding true love hard to come by in the isolated town of Bray, Okla. (pop. 1,035), posted a yard sign offering to pay $1,000 for help in finding a “virgin” bride between the ages of 12 and 24. Offended neighbors convinced him to take it down, but he replaced it with another, stating that his future wife must not be “pig-worshipping, heathen (or) white supremacist.” Theleman said he couldn’t understand the neighbors’ furor, recalling that his grandmother was married at 14 to “a much older man.”
Salt Lake City high school student Travis Williams was bitten by a baby rattlesnake in May, even though a companion had warned him to avoid it. Said Williams, “(E)ven though she told me not to … I picked it up anyway. I’m not too bright that way.”
Chesterton, Ind., high school student Michael Morris was hospitalized in May with a broken leg and broken arm after being run into by a friend driving an Acura at about 25 mph, but it was consensual. The friend described Morris as an adrenaline junkie who had had the friend run over him before, but Morris told the Times of Northwest Indiana, “I won’t do this no more.”
Women’s handbag designers, uncertain about the effect of Hurricane Katrina on Louisiana’s alligator habitats, spent the winter searching for new supplies of hides, according to a March Wall Street Journal report. The fall gator harvest saw prices rise 50 percent from two years earlier, forcing Ralph Lauren, for example, to raise the price of its most prestigious alligator purse to $14,000, and hide prices were expected to rise another 50 percent this summer. (Alligator shoes, shirts and coats have also soared in price, and the alligator-paneled piano sold by Giorgio’s of Palm Beach now costs $950,000.)
(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