xxxNews Of The Weirdxxx
Bizarre but true stories about real people collected by syndicated columnist Chuck Shepherd.
An Illinois Appellate Court in April upheld a lower court ruling reversing Mongo the steer’s disqualification for steroids after he had been chosen junior grand champion at the 2003 Illinois State Fair. Mongo had tested positive for the anti-inflammatory Banamine, for his sore foot, but the court declared the test improperly administered. It was a victory for Mongo’s owner, Whitney Gray, but of utterly no benefit to Mongo, who shortly after the fair was slaughtered for steak.
In February, children’s book author Frank Feldmann, 35, trespassed to the top of the St. Augustine (Fla.) Lighthouse in the middle of the night, wearing a tiger suit, to decry child pornography on the Internet. However, his point was not immediately understood by police on the ground below because of communication problems posed by his voice-muffling tiger mask.
The residents of Steuben County in upstate New York, who attended a community rally in January to protest a planned clean-energy windmill farm, mostly criticized its unsightliness, but one opponent objected because windmill blades make whirring noises that to him resemble sounds of Nazi holocaust torture.
New York City raw-food restaurateur Dan Hoyt, 43, was sentenced to two years’ probation in April for a highly publicized 2005 incident in which he indecently exposed himself on a subway train in front of a 22-year-old woman, who reacted by photographing him with her cell phone and displaying the shot on the Internet. In an April interview with New York magazine, Hoyt shrugged off the incident, calling his habit just another facet of a “pretty cool,” thrill-seeking person. “I’ve met women who enjoy (being flashed).” Except for the subway incident, even his victim would “probably want to go out with me.”
(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
