Originally published 11.05.00
>
>News of the Weird(.665)
>
>LEAD STORIES
>
>Wealthy retired Italian law professor Giacinto Auriti began in July to
>circulate a private currency, called the "simec," among citizens (and about
>40
>shopkeepers) in the town of Guardiagrele (about 125 miles from Rome), to
>"prove" his longstanding theory that any currency, if put in the hands of
>consumers instead of banks, yields more purchasing power. Auriti prints the
>simecs, sells them at par with the lira, and then guarantees to merchants
>that
>he will redeem them at double their value (by paying out from his family
>fortune), thereby encouraging merchants to lower their prices. The simec
>has
>caused an explosion of consumer sales, but the government believes the
>whole
>idea is ridiculous and will collapse as soon as Auriti stops guaranteeing
>simecs' value.
>
>The World Wrestling Federation (whose savage, tawdry matches, under the
>slogan "WWF Attitude!" top cable TV ratings) filed a lawsuit against
>William
>Morris Agency in October, asking a judge to please rescue it from a 1997
>contract in which it handed over to the agency a piece of every future
>dollar
>it earns. WWF argues that, unable to protect itself, it was bullied by WMA
>into signing an exploitative contract.
>
>------------------------------------------------------------------------
>Cavalcade of Hypocrisy
>
>In October, Matthew J. Glavin, president of the conservative legal
>foundation
>leading the fight to disbar President Clinton for lying about his sexual
>affairs, was charged with public indecency, allegedly caught trolling for
>anonymous male sex partners in a suburban Atlanta park. And John Paulk,
>whose
>personal "religion cures homosexuality" experience landed him on the cover
>of
>Newsweek in 1998, was demoted as an executive with the Christian group
>Focus
>on the Family after he was caught in October reveling in a Washington,
>D.C.,
>gay bar. And Mike Trout, another Focus on the Family official, resigned in
>October after confessing to an extramarital affair.
>
>------------------------------------------------------------------------
>Police Blotter
>
>Two Altamonte Springs, Fla., police officers were suspended in August
>after a photograph turned up of one officer exposing his genitals during a
>music festival. The two officers had been stationed near the stage for
>security and were being handed fans' cameras to take close-up photos of the
>performers, and somehow, one fan got her camera back with the extra photo.
>Initially, the officer who aimed the camera defended his action by
>claiming,
>inexplicably, that he and his buddy were just fooling around and that he
>did
>not believe there was film in the camera.
>
>Jeffrey Bruette and his former roommate filed an $8 million lawsuit
>against the Montgomery County (Md.) Police in July, alleging that they were
>humiliated when child-pornography charges were filed against them because
>of a
>videotape they had shot and handed to police. In early 1999, the two men,
>concerned that a teen-age neighbor boy was stealing from them, had set up a
>surveillance camera, which happened to catch the boy involved in sex with
>the
>men's dogs. They ultimately handed the tape to police to facilitate the
>boy's
>getting counseling, but then police arrested them as if the video had been
>made for sexual purposes, and the men now sue to clear their reputations.
>
>------------------------------------------------------------------------
>Ewwwwww! Gross!
>
>In July, residents of Wertz Avenue in Charleston, W.Va., were just about
>at the breaking point because of chronic blocked-sewer problems. Not only
>do
>the city's storm drains regularly get clogged, sending raw sewage into the
>street, but recent sewer line backups have spilled waste from Gunnoe's
>Whole
>Hog Sausage slaughtering and processing plant, in the form of waves of
>blood
>and meat chunks oozing down the street.
>
>Chippewa Falls (Wis.) High School senior John E. Smith Jr. was suspended
>in September for a revenge-based prank in which he brought a cake to school
>and announced that it was his birthday and that he wanted to share it with
>administrators. As the six staff members who accepted his generosity found
>out
>with their first bites, the secret ingredient in the cake was clumps of
>hair
>from different areas of Smith's body.
>
>------------------------------------------------------------------------
>Latest Religious Messages
>
>Darryl Bruce McDowell, 34, was arrested near Cranbrook, British Columbia,
>in July and charged with assault and seven other counts related to roughing
>up
>his common-law wife, against whom he was allegedly retaliating for her
>having
>tried to leave him. According to his own testimony at a bail hearing,
>McDowell
>uses a wooden rod from time to time to discipline the wife and her children
>as
>the Book of Proverbs "command(s)" him to do. Said McDowell, "There is no
>enjoyment about rodding. It's a biblical imperative."
>
>Among the issues roiling the Roman Catholics' Italian Bishops Conference
>in Turin in September was the pending recommendation that all exorcisms be
>conducted in Latin rather than in local languages, and an important
>subissue,
>according to a report from The Independent (London), was how Satan ought
>therefore to be addressed: by the formal version of the Latin pronoun "you"
>("lei") or the more intimate version ("tu").
>
>------------------------------------------------------------------------
>Those Sensitive Fetuses
>
>Sylvia Louise Gillard O'Brien filed a lawsuit in Halifax, Nova Scotia, in
>August, asking about $7 million from Coca-Cola because, while she was
>pregnant
>in 1997, a Fruitopia bottle broke while she was drinking from it, cutting
>her
>lip and causing her to bite on shards; she claims that her resulting fear
>of
>miscarriage caused the fetus, now a child of 3, to fail to trust and like
>her
>sufficiently. And Jeffrey and Julie Marie Leinweber filed a lawsuit in
>Medina,
>Ohio, in July for $50,000, claiming that Mrs. Leinweber's third-trimester
>fetus was so stressed by an auto accident (even though the child, now 3,
>shows
>no apparent effects) that the "special bond between mother and child" was
>"taken away" by the collision.
>
>------------------------------------------------------------------------
>Recurring Themes
>
>In 1999, News of the Weird reported on two South Koreans who ran insurance
>scams by chopping off their own feet and finger for payoffs of $40,000 and
>$7,500, respectively. During a two-week period in August 2000, three more
>scams were reported: Huang Chun-ming, 35, hacked off his wrist after
>purchasing additional insurance (Taichung, Taiwan); Chen Shih-hung, 37,
>chopped off his finger to make his claim (Chiching, Taiwan); and a
>28-year-old
>man was charged with collecting $15,000 in an insurance payout in
>Dusseldorf,
>Germany, after he castrated himself and blamed it on a gang's attack.
>
>------------------------------------------------------------------------
>Undignified Deaths
>
>A 16-year-old boy riding in a car near Gaston, Ore., in August was killed
>by
>an airborne, 1,500-pound elk that had just been hit by a truck. In April,
>another 16-year-old boy, on his bicycle, was killed by an airborne deer
>that
>had just been hit by a car in North Canton, Ga. (And in August, Hida
>Yochikata, 37, survived, but with major back injuries, after being hit by
>an
>airborne dog that had fallen from a ninth-floor window in a Paris suburb.)
>
>------------------------------------------------------------------------
>Also, in the Last Month ...
>
>Murder defendant Gregory D. Murphy, strolling out of his uneventful
>pre-trial
>hearing, suddenly turned and coldcocked his lawyer with a left to the face
>(Alexandria, Va.). A woman filed a lawsuit against the American Red Cross,
>claiming that she contracted oral herpes from her CPR class's unsanitized
>dummy (Hammond, Ind.). In a settlement of fraud charges with the Florida
>attorney general, a psychic hotline agreed to hire only people who swore in
>writing that they had psychic powers. An off-duty police officer, out on
>bond
>after his arrest on suspicion of DUI in the deaths of two motorists, was
>himself hit by a drunk driver a week later while out bicycling (Kailua,
>Hawaii).
>

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