News of the Weird

[Brian R.]

On Nov. 18, a man wearing a sweatshirt with the hood pulled tightly over his head and a mask covering all but his eyes pounded on the front door of Security Federal Savings Bank in Durham, N.C., scaring employees inside. After several loud attempts to push open the door, which is a "pull" door, he fled. Durham police say precisely the same thing happened at another bank on Oct. 22.
--
A state appeals court in Santa Ana upheld a lower court by granting Sheryle Ulyate an increase in child support payments from her ex-husband for their 15-year-old daughter, from $2,000 a month to $6,000 a month. Ulyate said the girl's monthly expenses included $2,000 for clothing, $300 for jewelry, and $1,600 for entertainment, and she asked for $15,000 a month. The
ex-husband made a fortune selling mini-blinds.
--
In July, a Jackson Center, Pa., woman reported that someone used a ladder to climb into the second story of her home and that all that was missing was $10 worth of diapers, despite the presence of jewelry and antiques in the same room.
--
Police in Key West, Fla., were called to a house in September to quell a loud argument in which a 28-year-old woman was accusing her female friend, 29, of attempting to steal her "strap-on deluxe model" vibrator, which she said was valued at $90.
--
Antonio Castro Jr., 45, and his wife pleaded guilty to defrauding the supermarket tabloids the Globe, the Star and the National Enquirer by selling them 547 phony tips on celebrity gossip over a four-year period.
--
Ronald Melvin Gower, 31, was arrested in Princeton, Ky., after he tried to rob a bank with a toy gun. One teller refused to hand over money, and as the robber tried to persuade her, another employee, carrying a Polaroid camera to take a picture of a car later in the day, snapped the robber's
picture. Gower allegedly backed away, said he was just kidding, and asked for change of a $100. (Gower was wearing a rolled-up stocking under his cap, but had forgotten to pull it over his face as a mask.)
--
The robbery of an Office Depot store in Lennox, just after closing, was aborted when the robber, after locking workers inside, walked out the back door to tell accomplices it was OK to come inside. The door locked behind him.
--
A man wearing a wig and glue-on mustache and sideburns tried to rob a Seattle check-cashing store in November, presenting a clerk with a hand-written note. The note, said the clerk, "was just a bunch of gibberish. I didn't even try to read it; it was just ridiculous." The man declined a request for clearer instructions and left, swearing.
--
David D. Cousins, 22, was arrested for bank robbery in Quincy, IL, in November, after being tricked by the bank's executive vice president, Louis McClelland, into surrendering after a six-hour standoff. McClelland had faked a heart attack and told Cousins that if he died, the robbery would be
too gruesome to be acceptable for movie rights, but that if he got medical treatment, he could help Cousins sell the story so they could both achieve fame and fortune. Shortly afterward, Cousins surrendered.
--
A 42-year-old man was found not guilty by reason of insanity in Gainesville, Fla., in January on charges that he set fire to 22 churches in Florida, Colorado and Tennessee in a 10-month period. The man said he set the fires as punishment because he thought church computers were sending him signals
to become gay.
--
Recent prices for the Kremlovka hospital in Moscow (formerly the main facility for members of the Politburo and the Supreme Soviet): the equivalent of $2 a day for a room, $100 for a gall bladder operation, 15 cents per tooth for dental fillings.
--
The Tass news agency reported in December that Olga Frankevich, who fled Soviet security police in 1947 during the Stalinist purge, surfaced from a house in western Ukraine, where she had been hiding under a bed for 45 years. Her slightly bolder sister roamed the house but never left it.
--
A 40-year-old man in Taylor, Mich., dropped dead of a heart attack minutes after bowling his first-ever perfect "300" game (12 strikes in a row).
--
Researchers at Auburn State University and Wayne State University surveyed 49 metropolitan areas and found that the more country and western radio music, the higher the suicide rate.
--
Terrible diet and room with no ventilation are being blamed on the death of a men who was killed by his own gas. There was no mark on his body but autopsy showed large amounts of methane gas in his system. His diet had consisted of beans (they said what kind; I forgot) cabbage (and a couple other things). It was just the right combination of foods. It appears that the man died in his sleep from breathing from the poisonous cloud that was hanging over his bed. The ME said, had he been outside or had his windows opened it wouldn't have been fatal but the man was shut up in his near airtight room. He was "...a big man with a huge capacity for creating [this deadly gas]." Three of the rescue workers got sick and one was hospitalized.

[This message has been edited by Brian R. (edited 30 August 2000).]

[Alec]

Been there, done that.

No, seriously, I found that site about one year ago and I was amazed at the things that we humans can do.

[Brian R.]

David Frost's Book of the World's Worst Decisions

Sam Phillips owned a small recording company in Memphis. In 1955 he sold to RCA Records, for the sum of $35,000, the exclusive contract he had with a young man named Elvis Presley, thereby forfeiting royalties on more than a billion records.

In 1889 the editor of the San Francisco Examiner published one article by Rudyard Kipling but declined to accept any more. "I'm sorry, Mr. Kipling," he said, "but you just don't know how to use the English language."

In 1981 Dora Wilson looked out her window and saw some men loading her neighbor's priceless Persian carpets into a van. "What are you doing?" she called. "We're taking them to be cleaned," the men replied. "Will you take mine too?" she asked. They did, and she never saw the men or the carpets
again.

In 1910 Olav Olavson decided to raise some cash by selling his body to the Karolinska Institute, for medical research after his death. The following year he inherited a fortune and tried to buy himself back. The institute refused to sell and went to court to verify their claim. They even won damages, since Olav had had two teeth pulled without asking their permission.

In 1938 Joe Shuster and Jerry Siegel sold all rights to the comic-strip character Superman to their publishers for $130, a tidy $65 each.

In 1977 a South African hang-gliding instructor spotted an interesting sight and made an obscene gesture at a woman who was sunbathing on a rooftop below his flight path. The woman's husband appeared with a submachine gun and blasted the birdman out of the sky.

In 1898 young Albert Einstein applied for admission to the Munich Technical Institute, but was turned down on the grounds that he "showed no promise" as a student.

In 1880 a house master at Harrow wrote of one of his pupils, "He is forgetful, careless, unpunctual, irregular in every way.... If he is unable to conquer this slovenliness he will never make a success of public school." The boy in question was Winston Churchill.

In 1940 the British Secret Service decided that microfilms must be made of all personnel records, in case the originals were damaged by enemy action. It was only when the originals were, in fact, destroyed by enemy action that it was discovered that the photographer had cropped the top of every
negative so the name of the person to whom he file referred was missing.

In 1862 the Union and Confederacy forces met at the Battle of Antietam. The Union forces under General Burnside were ordered to cross the Potomac River and join battle with the enemy. They marched across the bridge two
abreast, making an ideal target for confederate gunners placed so as to command the bridge. The slaughter was appalling. General Burnside had failed to notice that the river was only waist deep and could have been crossed at any other point in perfect safety.

In 1886 prospector Sors Hariezon decided to sell his South African gold claim for $20. Over the next 90 years, mines sunk on or near his claim produced over a million kilograms of gold a year, 70% of the gold supply of the Western world.

During the 1950's when the BBC's new broadcasting facilities were built, the corridors were narrow and labyrinthine. The Music Department became concerned about the difficulties they would face in transporting their grand pianos from one studio to another, and decided on a series of trials to find the easiest route. They asked the BBC carpenters to make a plywood mockup
of a full-size piano rather than risk one of their expensive instruments. The model was duly constructed -- and found to be too large to pass through the door of the carpentry shop.

[Brian R.]

* Jane Bryne, 42, was arrested in Clayton, Mo., in March and charged with possession of cocaine. She had been in the second row of a courtroom attending the robbery trial of her boyfriend when her purse fell out of her lap, sending the contents rolling underneath the seats to the front row. A police officer sitting in front of her gathered the lipstick and cosmetics to return them when he noticed one of the items was a vial of cocaine. [Columbia Daily Tribune-AP, 3-21-93]

* In September, in Irvington Township, N. J., Joseph Frajkor, 45, was trapped in his car for 20 minutes after a suicide victim leaped from an overpass on the Garden State Parkway and landed on the car, crushing it and preventing Frajkor from being able to free himself. [New York Times-AP, 9-8-92]

* Jeffery Ham was convicted in New Orleans in April of shooting his girlfriend to death. One police officer testified that Ham told him he had shot her after watching a Presidential debate on TV because "she chose the wrong side" and because she wanted to watch a sex tape right after the debate, which Ham allegedly said would be disrespectful.[Times-Picayune, 4-13-93]

* A Reading, Pa., kidnaping victim was freed in Philadelphia in April after two suspects, who had attempted to get $200 from the victim's daughter, told her to call back when she had the money and gave her their home telephone number. Police matched the phone number to an address, went to the house, arrested Claude Smith, and freed the victim. Smith's partner fled. [Reading Eagle/Times, 4-23-93]

* Ken Charles Barger, 47, accidentally shot himself to death in December in Newton, N. C., when, awakening to the sound of a ringing telephone beside his bed, he reached for the phone but grabbed instead a Smith & Wesson .38 Special, which discharged when he drew it to his ear. [Hickory Daily Record, 12-21-92]

* In April, a San Francisco coroner's office "senior investigator," on the scene to investigate a downtown traffic fatality, got back into his van, put it in reverse, and accidentally drove over the dead man's body, to the screams of bystanders. Apparently bewildered by the crowd, he then drove forward over the body. [San Francisco Examiner, 4-9-93]

* Northwest Missouri Community College basketball coach Ed Corporal resigned in June after the St. Joseph News-Press reported that almost all of the breathtaking athletic credentials on his resume were false, most of them almost effortlessly disproved by checking easily-accessible sports record books. Among the honors Corporal claimed were an NBA career with the New Jersey Nets, three straight years on the Southeastern Conference all-star basketball team (with Charles Barkley), and the University of Florida's "all-decade" team for the 1980s. When informed that none of the institutions had ever heard of him, Corporal was at first defiant: "Why they wouldn't have records of it, I don't know. I don't have any reason to make things up." [St. Joseph News-Press, 6-26-93]

* Four people were arrested in Sacramento, Calif., in January after they kidnaped a woman and threatened to kill her unless she entered her bank and withdrew money for them while they waited outside in a truck. Once inside the bank, the woman merely notified the security guard, who called police, who came and arrested the men. [Sacramento Union, 1-23-93]

* In June, a sheriff's bomb squad in Madison, Wis., alerted by a Valley Bank branch burglar alarm, found a bottle containing nitroglycerin set to explode when connected to an electric detonator. Deputies concluded that the burglar had fled because the extension cord he had brought for the detonator had come up about three feet short of the nearest electrical outlet. [Milwaukee Journal, Jun93]

* Christopher White, 22, was arrested in Boothwyn, Pa., in July and charged with burglary after police were summoned to the offices of a housing development in the middle of the night by a 911 operator. Police said White had attempted to dial a 900-sex service from the office but had inadvertently dialed 911, whose equipment automatically records the number from the calling telephone. [[Warren Tribune-Chronicle, Jul93]]

* Ray Douglas Thomas, Jr., 37, was arrested in July in San Antonio and charged with the theft of 13 bags of potting soil from a builder's supply store. While being chased by police, Thomas tried to leap from the driver's seat of his moving car, got his sleeve caught in the door, was dragged 60 feet, fell free, and was run over by the car's rear wheel, at which point police easily nabbed him. [San Antonio Express-News, 7-18-93]

* Toronto police in June were trying to trace a thumbprint they thought would identify the person who burglarized the offices of Hayden Communications. The burglar made off with $75, but while in the office apparently took time out to play with Leslie Hayden's container of Silly Putty, in which the thumbprint was left. [Globe and Mail, 6-24-93]

* Boynton Beach, Fla., police believe that it was a drug-addicted burglar who broke into Nathan Radlich's house in May and stole a tackle box that contained the ashes of Radlich's late sister, Gertrude. Because more valuable items were not taken, police believe the burglar thought he had stumbled upon a cache of cocaine. [Houston Chronicle-Ft. Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel, 5-4-93]

* In June, Richard Simonetti, 17, & George Montenez, 21, of Brooklyn, N.Y., were arrested in Brooklyn, Conn., and charged with a robbery that had taken place earlier in the evening. According to Connecticut state police, the men had committed the robbery in Bridgeport, about 50 miles from Brooklyn, N.Y., and had intended to drive home. However, they became confused and drove over 100 miles in the wrong direction on the interstate highway. When they saw the sign for "Brooklyn," they exited, thinking they were home, became more confused, tried to force a motorist to help them, and were captured. [Willimantic, Conn., Chronicle, 6-12-93]


[This message has been edited by Brian R. (edited 01 September 2000).]