News of the Weird: October

By Chuck Shepherd

Video Nation

As a 27-year-old woman lay dying from a stab wound incurred at a Wichita, Kan., convenience store, in June, at least five customers stepped over her to enter the store, including one who stopped to photograph her on a cell phone camera.

Recurring Themes

In July, a team from Hong Kong Polytechnic Institute, citing “the complex 3-D geometry” of the breast, offered a mathematical equation that they said would yield greater comfort, producing a larger variety of sizes for bras. The researchers tried out 100 different measurements, eventually narrowed to eight — overall build, volume, breast shape (inner, outer and lower), height, “gradient” and “orientation.” Their “depth/width ratio” would increase the number of sizes from the current A/B/C/D to as many as 20.

Not her favorite color

In August, employees at the bar Changes, in Seattle, had to break up a karaoke-night attack by a woman on a man who was singing the Coldplay song “Yellow.” The woman had shouted, “Oh, no, not that song. I can’t stand that song.” She charged the stage, screamed at the man and shoved him (and it eventually took four men to hold her for police).

Yikes!

Australian rugby league player Ben Czislowski, 24, complaining of an eye infection and pain in July, was found by doctors to have, embedded in his head, a tooth belonging to opponent Matt Austin, with whom he had violently collided in an April match. Austin also lost several other teeth in the collision.

Obsess Much?

Ric Hoogestraat is married to Sue and works at a call center in the Phoenix area but spends 30-plus hours a week inside the online Second Life video game, pretending that he is the digitally drawn Dutch Hoorenbeek, a 6-foot-9, muscular babe magnet who lives on his own island. That unnerves Sue, according to an August Wall Street Journal profile, especially since Dutch recently “married” a digital woman and set up housekeeping with their two digital dogs. (The real-life creator of the new Mrs. Hoorenbeek has never met Ric and says she never will.) Dutch and his wife spend hours shopping and motorcycling together, leaving Ric little time for Sue. “Is this man cheating on his wife (meaning Sue)?” the Journal asked. Lamented Sue: “You try to talk to (Ric) or bring (him) a drink, and (he)’ll be having sex with a cartoon.”

Professional Something

Brian Blair, now a county commissioner in Tampa, Fla., asserted in a 2002 lawsuit that he had been forced into retirement from his previous career as a professional wrestler after he tripped over a tray of dishes and hurt himself at a Carrabba’s restaurant. Blair announced in August 2007 that a settlement had been reached with Carrabba’s, and thus he would not explain (according to a deposition cited by Carrabba’s attorneys) how the “ca-reer-ending” injury allowed him to keep lucrative wrestling dates in Japan months after he fell, or how he registered a .089 blood-alcohol reading that evening even though he admitted to only one sip of wine, or how a sober professional wrestler accustomed to being thrown across a ring could be hurt so badly by a simple fall, or how a politician who generally abides a pro-business, anti-lawsuit philosophy could have initiated such litigation.

Least Competent Criminals

Jazmine Roberts, 19, was apprehended by a Neiman Marcus security guard in White Plains, N.Y., in August and held for police after she allegedly walked out of the store with a $250 pair of jeans and raged against the guard. According to a police report, Roberts was under the impression that once she walked out the door, she was immune from arrest, telling the guard, “It’s too late. I already left the store.”