Fun_People Archive
3 Apr
Weirdness [474] - 5Mar97

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From: Peter Langston <psl>
Date: Thu,  3 Apr 97 12:21:20 -0800
To: Fun_People
Subject: Weirdness [474] - 5Mar97

Excerpted-from: WEIRDNUZ.474 (News of the Weird, March 5, 1997)
		by Chuck Shepherd

* Dick Shields made the Pittsburgh, Pa., newspapers on his 75th birthday on
January 11 for his remarkable recuperative powers.  Among the medical
traumas from which he has recovered:  in a coma near death for a week after
a burst appendix; three times a broken neck (once while falling out of bed
during recuperation from a previous broken neck); a broken back;
triple-bypass heart surgery; a grapefruit-sized blockage of a blood vessel;
a fungus that ate the skin off his feet; and duty during World War II that
included hand-marking of active mines.  Said Shields, apparently without
irony:  "I'd have to say I've been truly blessed."

* Member of the First Husbands Club:  In October, welfare workers found
a 50-year-old man living alone in a cave in Ifsahan province in Iran.
According to the workers, he had moved there 30 years ago when his wife
dumped him.

* In January, the wife of Dr. Michael Baden--he is the head of the New York
State Police's forensics unit--filed papers in her divorce action against
him in New York City.  (Baden testified on behalf of O. J. Simpson that the
victims' knife wounds probably were caused by more than one assailant.)
According to his wife's papers, Baden once performed a pair of autopsies on
the couple's dining room table, once asked her permission to impregnate his
girlfriend, and once told her he could kill her and make it look like a
natural death.

* Pro wrestler Don Harris, 36 (6'6", 275 lbs.), who with twin brother Ron
performed as the Bruise Brothers, went to trial in Nashville in January in
his lawsuit against plastic surgeon Glenn Buckspan.  Harris had wanted his
pectorals tightened but wound up with misplaced nipples such that he now
says he is mortified every time he takes his shirt off in public and now
wrestles only in a vest.

* Taking "Amateur Night" Too Far:  In Betulia, Colombia, an annual festival
in November includes five days of amateur bullfighting.  This year, no bull
was killed, but dozens of matadors were injured, including one gored in the
head and one Bobbittized.  Said one participant, "It's just one bull against
[a town of] a thousand morons."

* Randy Farmer of a Houston, Tex., suburb was one of the millions of people
around the world who felt compelled to welcome in 1997 by firing off a few
gunshots just after midnight.  Farmer shot at a backyard tree, but then the
gun jammed, and he went back inside to unjam it.  He mishandled his gun and
accidentally shot and killed his 7-year-old daughter.  Said Farmer, "God
had a hand in this.  He had to.  It was like God called my baby home to be
with him, and God used me as a tool to bring her to him."

* On February 21, the Court of Appeal of Singapore ruled that oral sex is
illegal as a substitute for "natural" intercourse but permissible if it is
merely foreplay leading to such intercourse.  The ruling came as part of a
decision against a 47-year-old man who had convinced a 19-year-old woman
that the only way to disgorge poisons in her system was to perform oral sex
on him.

	Copyright 1997 by Universal Press Syndicate.

© 1997 Peter Langston