News of the Weird: September

By Chuck Shepherd

Not My Fault

Amy Mueller filed a lawsuit recently against Samy’s Bar and Grill in Joliet, Ill., after she willingly tried to climb onto the bar to dance in May 2006 but fell and broke her ankle. Samy’s should have had a “ladder” or other climbing aid, said Mueller’s lawyer.

Drug Law Enforcement

Chicago police arrested three alleged dope-sellers in June after casually spotting one of them inside a garage with the door open, bagging $670,000 worth of marijuana. The police came upon the garage while chasing a man who had been urinating in public.

Oops!

Recently, a 17-year-old boy survived but was seriously injured when he fell about 75 feet onto some rocks at California’s Mount Diablo State Park. He had climbed over a handrail in order to fake a fall so that his pals could capture the plunge on video to put on his MySpace Web page.

Redneck Games

East Dublin, Ga. (in July), and Athens, Texas (in August), sponsored their own versions of Redneck Games, with events such as mud-pit belly-flopping, seed-spitting and making armpit music (Georgia), as well as (in Texas) “red-neck horseshoes” (played with toilet seats), a Spam-and-jalapeno-eating contest, a mattress chuck, men bobbing for raw animal parts in tomato paste, and the ever-popular coed butt crack contest. Wrote the San Antonio Express-News: “There was something strangely arresting about watching 10 serious-faced guys grind away at pink bricks of Spam while Steppenwolf’s ‘Born to Be Wild’ boomed from the loudspeakers.”

Recurring Themes

Another prominent company of very large dancers is flourishing (this one in Cuba), performing with remarkable grace the forms of classical ballet, and even popular steps, despite sometimes thundering across the stage, “convey(ing) an excitement akin to a stampede,” according to a July New York Times dispatch from Havana. Like others (such as Henri Oguike’s Big Ballet in the U.K.), Danza Voluminosa is home to talented ballerinas who happen to be much too hefty (several around 300 pounds) for traditional troupes. Danza capitalizes on its bulk by offering storylines on gluttony, fat prejudice and the psychological problems of obesity.

People Different From Us

The Orient Industry Co. of Tokyo each month turns out 80 life-size, anatomically correct and finely detailed “love dolls” that retail for the equivalent of $850 to $5,500 each, for men who would rather hang out with toys than women, according to a July Reuters dispatch. The more expensive models are admirably life-like, made of silicon and with 35 movable joints. Reuters found one customer, Mr. “Ta-Bo,” who owns at least two dozen of them (each with a name), even though he claims to be seeing five real women on the side. “Sex with human girls was better,” he said, “but I hate the process of dating.”

In the Courts

In February, a New Jersey appeals court ruled against the town of Voorhees, which had waged a nearly three-year battle with a businessman because it disputed the shade of paint he had used on his Friendly’s restaurant. Town officials said it wasn’t “sandy” (the required color for buildings in that particular shopping center), but rather “creamy yellow.” The township spent $20,000 fighting for “sandy,” and the restaurateur spent $70,000 to show that “creamy yellow” matched the other buildings, and the appeals court judges seemingly just shrugged.

Holding Out

Australian Jeffrey Lee is the last surviving member of the clan that controls the Koongarra uranium deposit near Kakadu National Park (east of Darwin), and federal law requires his permission for the French energy company Areva to extract the estimated 14,000 tons, perhaps worth the equivalent of $4.2 billion (U.S.), but Lee vouches never to sell because “if you disturb that land, bad things will happen.” “This is my country,” he told the Sydney Morning Herald in July. “I’m not interested in money. I’ve got a job. … I can go fishing and hunting. That’s all that matters to me.”

Can’t Possibly Be True

Sweden’s English-language news outlet reported in June that the government’s employment service had granted Roger Tullgren, 42, supplemental income benefits based on his illness of addiction to heavy-metal music. Tullgren (with long, black hair, tattoos and skull-and-crossbones jewelry and who said he attended nearly 300 concerts last year) said he had been addicted for 10 years but finally got three psychologists to sign off on calling his condition a disability. His employer now permits Tullgren to play his music at his dishwashing job.

News that Sounds Like a Joke

Once-classified reports obtained by the Associated Press in May revealed that three times in late 2005 and early 2006, the U.S. Department of Defense issued espionage alerts regarding newly designed Canadian 25-cent pieces, which the Pentagon warned may contain embedded transmitters capable of eavesdropping, and which perhaps were given purposely to U.S. contractors working in Canada. Some time later, according to the reports, the Pentagon learned that the coin’s coating was not a film-and-mesh transmitter but merely a covering to preserve the limited-issue coin’s unique design.

A New Delhi, India, glaciologist said in June that global warming in the Himalayas is at least partly responsible for the melting of the stalagmite in the Amarnath cave in Kashmir, which is one of Hindus’ holiest pilgrimage sites because the giant icicle is said to symbolize Lord Shiva (the god of destruction and regeneration), who is typically represented by phalluses. A caretaker of the site told Reuters that the stalagmite is melting rapidly, though it has varied in size from year to year, with the lean years thought to represent Lord Shiva’s displeasure about something.

Ironies

Florida state Rep. Bob Allen was a co-sponsor earlier in 2007 of legislation to increase the penalty for “public lewdness and indecent exposure,” such as trolling for sex partners in public restrooms (upping the crime from a misdemeanor to a felony). The bill did not pass, which was lucky for Rep. Allen, who was arrested in July in a men’s room in Titusville when undercover officers said he entered and exited three times in the space of a few minutes, peered over a restroom stall and offered oral sex for $20.