xxxNews Of The Weirdxxx
Bizarre but true stories about real people collected by syndicated columnist Chuck Shepherd.
Cities feel fortunate to have even one dependable group of dedicated volunteer caretakers for a public park, but Boston’s Ringer Park has two. However, they hate each other. According to an April Boston Globe story, Ringer Park Partnership Group and Friends of Ringer Park spread nasty rumors about each other, compete ruthlessly for new members, resist mediation more fiercely than some street gangs do, and, allegedly, commit park vandalism in order to embarrass the other group. The origin of the feud appears to be differences in aggressiveness and in attitudes toward dogs, and according to the Globe, peace is not in sight.
In June, another client who did her own lawyering, eccentric Susan Polk, was convicted of murdering her husband, after a long trial in Martinez, Calif., in which she spent two weeks on the witness stand as both questioner and witness (and in a judge-allowed departure, as her deep-voiced husband, as she re-created their conversations). Polk also told the jury that she is psychic, that she called the Sept. 11 attacks in advance, that her husband was an Israeli intelligence agent, that she once foiled an assassination attempt on the pope, and that Colin Powell is the Antichrist.
The 13-year-old blond, blue-eyed, twin white-supremacist singers, Lynx and Lamb Gaede (“Prussian Blue,” mentioned here in December), might lower their profile temporarily while their divorced parents fight over custody in Fresno, Calif. Though mom April Gaede is still a white supremacist (“I’m a racist … Everybody’s a racist”), dad Kris Lingelser said he has renounced his separatist ways and would like to soften the girls’ views, too, but so far, he has only limited visitation rights to April’s home in Montana.
(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