an weekly weird news update

dear readers

here is an new feature i call our weird news roundup from www.newsoftheweird.com

glass houses and stones

In court papers filed in 1994 but which only recently drew public attention, lawyers for the Catholic Archdiocese of Portland, Ore., challenged a child-support claim against a priest by pointing out the culpability of the mother herself for failing to use birth control (which the church regards a grave sin). The 1994 document came to light when the woman went back to court in July 2005 for an increase in child support, but the court turned her down in deference to Father Arturo Uribe's vow of poverty, although Uribe's ordaining order subsequently volunteered more support. (The man who was archbishop of Portland during the 1994 case recently assumed Pope Benedict's previous job as the Vatican's chief doctrinist.) [Los Angeles Times, 8-3-05]

bad reasoning

(1) Ronald Schueller, convicted of attempting to hire someone to knock his estranged wife unconscious and kidnap her, said (according to prosecutors) that he was just trying to reconcile with her, based on an idea from a "Dr. Phil" TV segment in which the host said that sometimes people need a good scare to realize their delusions (Port Washington, Wis., August). (2) Jessica Stakelbeck, 22, charged with neglect when two of her diaper-clad toddlers were found on the side of a highway, blamed her lapse not on being high from her admitted methamphetamine habit but on sleepiness from missing her meth for several days (Franklin, Ind, August). [Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, 8-9-05] [Johnson County Daily Journal, 8-4-05]

wrongness center

News of the Weird has often mentioned cases of bestiality, but the death of a 45-year-old man in Enumclaw, Wash., in July was extraordinary. The death was reported in the local media as having occurred after "sex with a horse," but bestiality usually involves the human as the penetrator. In this case, though, the man died of acute peritonitis from a perforated colon, indicating that the horse was the penetrator. Investigators reportedly also seized videotapes of the activity, which took place at a nondescript farm that was apparently known in Internet bestiality chat rooms to be a covert haven for sex with livestock. (Washington is one of 17 states without a specific anti-bestiality law, and authorities said that the act was probably not a crime, in that the state's animal-cruelty law would require showing that the horse suffered.) [Seattle Times, 7-15-05, 7-16-05]

Lawyers for horror novelist Stephen King acknowledged in June that King had been sued once again by Anne Hiltner, who now claims that the obsessed, psychotic nurse in the movie "Misery" must have been based on her. She had earlier claimed that a psychic character from King's TV show "Kingdom Hospital" was based on her and sued him before that for allegedly breaking into her home and stealing manuscripts. [The Record (Hackensack, N.J.), 6-19-05]

and finally,

driver of suv crashes into operation room

Performing eye surgery is no simple task. Even with the aid of sophisticated instruments, the slightest miscalculation can cause irreparable damage to the patient's sight.

One South Orange surgeon learned yesterday morning, however, that the work is far more difficult when a 4,300-pound SUV comes barreling through the wall during an operation.

Bernard Spier was finishing a routine cataract surgery at Northern New Jersey Eye Institute at 8:37 a.m. yesterday when another patient drove his red Toyota 4Runner through the wall, stopping just inches from Spier and the patient lying partially sedated on a gurney in the middle of the room.

"I had my back to the wall, and I was looking through the microscope when I heard an explosion," Spier said as he sat amid the wreckage yesterday afternoon. "I looked off to the right, and all I saw was the wall caving in, and then I started to see the SUV."

With the front end of the vehicle inside the building and the front wheels spinning a cloud of dark smoke, Spier and his staff rushed the patient out of the room. A witness ran in from the parking lot and pulled the driver from the vehicle.

When the cataract patient regained all of his senses, his gurney was sitting on the sidewalk in front of the building while the SUV remained lodged in the operating room wall.

According to the police accident report, Floyd Hunt Jr., 77, of Newark was trying to back out of a parking space outside the operating room, but he failed to put the car into reverse.

When he hit the gas, the SUV hopped the curb and plowed through the wall, bending steel beams, buckling the ceiling and damaging a $70,000 ultrasound machine used to break up and remove cataracts.

this is from http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1470187/posts

as you can see the world is strange and is getting stranger.

love and peace,

Alex Stallwitz