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Home - News of the Weird
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News of the Weird - |
by Chuck Shepherd
Illustrations by Tom Briscoe
Extreme Cosmetics
“Many of my young patients think about getting plastic surgery the way they’d think about getting their hair done,” explained Dr. David Alessi of Beverly Hills, Calif., who is still amazed at women’s willingness to endure “extreme” cosmetic alterations. “Vaginal rejuvenation” (labiaplasty) might be the most sensational procedure, but surgeons also do “forehead implants” and ankle and shoulder liposuction, break and reset jaws to tweak smiles, and lengthen or shorten toes (for “toe cleavage” with certain shoes). Alessi told a Glamour magazine writer for an April story that one 25-year-old recently asked him to “remove” her navel (whereas most umbilicoplasty patients merely request reshaping). Said a bemused colleague, “There’s some consensus about what makes for an attractive … face, but we have no definition of the ideal navel.”
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News of the Weird - |
by Chuck Shepherd
Illustrations by Tom Briscoe
Asspendectomy
Update: Experimental “natural orifice” surgery might be health care’s next big thing following its U.S. introduction last year at Columbia University (as reported also in News of the Weird), where doctors removed a woman’s diseased gall bladder not by an abdominal incision but through her vagina. In March, doctors at UC-San Diego Medical Center removed a woman’s appendix through her vagina, and a man’s through his mouth. (A microscopic camera must be inserted through the abdomen, however, to guide the surgeons.) Pain and healing time are usually less than half that of ordinary surgery, but the risk of internal infection is greater. The next step, doctors say, will be removing kidneys through the anus. |
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News of the Weird - |
by Chuck Shepherd
Illustrations by Tom Briscoe
Death Row Woes
Lawyer confidentiality rules kept one man improperly on death row for 10 years and a probably innocent man in prison for 26, according to news that surfaced in January (in Virginia) and March (in Illinois). Daryl Atkins (sentenced to death in 1997) was the victim of probable prosecutorial misconduct, according to his co-defendant’s lawyer, Leslie Smith, who said he witnessed the misconduct but could not report it because a lesser sentence for Atkins would have exposed his own client to greater punishment. In Illinois, Alton Logan was convicted of a murder during a 1982 robbery. However, shortly afterward, Andrew Wilson admitted to his lawyers that he was the murderer, but bar association rules prohibited them from revealing that. When Wilson died in 2007, the lawyers went public, and Logan’s case has been re-opened.
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News of the Weird - |
by Chuck Shepherd
Illustrations by Tom Briscoe
China’s Image Police
China’s societal self-improvement in preparation for the 2008 Olympics continues. The Beijing Tourism Bureau ordered hotels to re-translate English signs, hoping to avoid such notorious past gaffes as “Racist Park,” which is now “Park of Ethnic Minorities,” and a cafe’s attempt to salute Western visitors with “Welcome, big nose friends.” And the Beijing Olympics Committee has been training hostesses for months to stand in military-like precision, straight enough to hold a sheet of paper between their knees, and to smile continuously, showing “six to eight teeth” (even if placing a chopstick in the mouth sideways is necessary for practice). There are height and weight requirements for the hostesses, and each must have an upper- to lower-body ratio of no more than 11-to-13, to eliminate, according to local newspapers, “big bottoms.” |
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New of the Weird - |
by Chuck Shepherd
Illustrations by Tom Briscoe
Crappy Theater
Irish director-playwright Paul Walker’s production of Ladies & Gents opened for a March run in New York City 29 blocks north of Broadway in a public restroom. According to an Associated Press report, the entire play takes place among the porcelain in a bathroom in Central Park, portraying “the seedy underside of 1950s Dublin,” with the audience of 25 standing beside rows of stalls, near “spiders, foul odors and puddles of questionable origin.” Walker proudly admits that he wanted to take the audience “out of their comfort zone” to create “a different energy.” Actor John O’Callaghan recalled that rehearsals were especially difficult: “One man actually came in and had a pee right in front of us.” |
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News of the Weird - |
by Chuck Shepherd
Illustrations by Tom Briscoe
Meat Madness
While March Madness dominates intercollegiate athletics, another group of collegians works out amidst coaches’ whistles, endures bloody, 12-hour practices, and cheers on teammates preparing for the national championship in meat-judging, in which about 40 colleges compete, according to a March Wall Street Journal report. Coaches at powerhouses like Colorado State and South Dakota State say skills such as evaluating T-bone cutting and spotting whether a pig has too much back fat come with determination and concentration (and, of course, practice, as one coach said it all comes down to time spent in the meat locker, at 38 degrees [Fahrenheit]). (And pro scouts are watching from the stands, representatives of U.S. meat companies, seeking talent.) |
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News of the Weird - |
by Chuck Shepherd
Illustrations by Tom Briscoe
Muskrat Congeniality
Dakota Abbott, 16, edged Samantha Phillips, 17, to become Miss Outdoors 2008 in February in Maryland’s Eastern Shore region’s annual beauty-contest-and-muskrat-skinning festival. The two were the only beauty contestants (out of eight) who entered both competitions. Abbott won her skinning division, but while she sang a song for the judges, Phillips won the talent trophy by skinning a muskrat on stage. “I’ll be honest,” she said to a Washington Post reporter. “I can’t sing. I can’t dance, and I don’t play any musical instruments.” But she took her 4-inch blade, sticking it just above the tail, and sliced. “You want to take your knuckles and separate the meat from the hide, just like this,” she told the judges, with her hand inside the muskrat (as one of the judges recoiled in shock).
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News of the Weird - |
by Chuck Shepherd
Illustrations by Tom Briscoe
Brand Freaks
India’s middle class is humming with “brand freaks” obsessed with luxury labels like Prada and Louis Vuitton, according to a February Washington Post dispatch, even though more than half the country lives in “abject poverty” (and even though Gandhi got along fine with just a loincloth!). Said one super-consumer, “I’ll spend my whole salary for a really swank brand and eat [steamed rice cakes] for the rest of the month.” According to the newly launched India edition of Vogue, the country’s “Me Culture” has taken over, where, on an Ahmadabad road underneath towering billboards for Tag Heuer and Mont Blanc pens, barefoot kids with begging bowls tap on car windows. Though animal rights activists estimate that the country has more uncared-for dogs on the streets than any other in the world, Gucci dog bowls are for sale in New Delhi.
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News of the Weird - |
by Chuck Shepherd
Illustrations by Tom Briscoe
Biting Analysis
In February, a Mississippi judge released two convicted rapists of children, who had each been in prison for more than 12 years, based on DNA. The men had been convicted primarily by the “bite mark” analysis of since-discredited dentist Dr. Michael West, who used iridescent lights and yellow goggles to demonstrate that scratches on the victims were bites by the two men. Subsequent independent analysis identified the scratches as scratches, perhaps even made by West himself, according to a director of the Innocence Project. West is a favorite colleague of medical examiner Steven Hayne, who seems always to find evidence of guilt of anyone charged by district attorney Forrest Allgood, according to a Reason magazine investigation. West’s bite “technology,” in particular, has been widely ridiculed by forensic professionals. |
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News of the Weird - |
by Chuck Shepherd
Illustrations by Tom Briscoe
Circus Heroism
The divorce of Anton Popazov and his wife, Nataliya, is about to go through, but the couple are still contractually committed to the Moscow State Circus, where their act includes Nataliya’s shooting an apple off of Anton’s head with a crossbow. The Times of London asked Anton during a show in Sheffield, England, in February whether he was afraid. “I still trust her because Nataliya is very professional,” he said. “[T]he show must go on.”
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News of the Weird - |
by Chuck Shepherd
Illustrations by Tom Briscoe
Sex Worker Art
Several Duke University campus organizations, including the Women’s Center, the Student Health Center and the Women’s Studies Department, sponsored a “Sex Workers Art Show” on Feb. 3, at which nearly nude “artists” danced for students and others while vulgarly criticizing America via acts such as a woman’s pretending to eat excreted dollar bills and a man’s kneeling with an American flag inserted in his rear end. Two years ago, Duke’s men’s lacrosse team was vilified by the Duke administration and faculty merely for hiring two female strippers for a party (from which emanated false charges of rape and the eventual disbarment of the local district attorney). A university spokesman explained to a National Journal reporter that the recent show was acceptable because it was “art” and “social commentary,” rather than male-bonding entertainment. |
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News of the Weird - |
by Chuck Shepherd
Cell Phone Novels
Five of the 10 best-selling novels in Japan in 2007 were originally composed, and serialized, on cell phones, thumbed out by women who had never written novels, for readers who mostly had never before read one. The genre’s dominating plotlines are affairs of the heart, and its characteristics, obviously, are simplicity of plot and character and brevity of expression (lest authors’ sore thumbs and readers’ tired eyes bring down the industry). Said one successful cell phone writer, for a January dispatch in The New York Times, her audience doesn’t read works by “professional writers” because “their sentences are too difficult to understand.” |
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News of the Weird - |
by Chuck Shepherd
Doping Pitches
China’s historical fascination with crickets has recently been exhibited in cricket beauty contests, singing competitions and prize fights, according to a January Los Angeles Times dispatch, and has led even to increasing vigilance about crickets cheating with performance-enhancing drugs. The fighters duel in terrarium-sized containers, and, according to the Times, “Overhead cameras [project] the action onto large screens,” allowing spectators close-ups of crickets tossing each other around with their powerful jaws. The best fighters may sell for the equivalent of $10,000, are raised on vegetables and calcium supplements, and are sexually active before fights. The doping issue mostly involves the “singers”; slowing the vibration of the cricket’s wings produces an attractively lower pitch.
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News of the Weird - |
Shih Tzu Politics
Mayor Grace Saenz-Lopez (Alice, Texas, pop. 19,000) and her twin sister were indicted in January for hiding evidence in a dognapping case. Saenz-Lopez had agreed to baby-sit a shih tzu but, alarmed by the dog’s sickliness, she kept it and lied to the owners that it had died. When it was spotted at a local grooming service, Saenz-Lopez and her sister allegedly began a cover-up that included the mayor’s once pretending to be her sister. The mayor told her lawyer that if not for her husband, she would go to jail “for the rest of [my] life” rather than give the dog back. Most recently, Saenz-Lopez reported that the dog had run away, but many of her constituents are skeptical.
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News of the Weird - |
The Buttcheek Bandit
Authorities in Valentine, Neb., have been on the lookout since November for the vandal who has approached several storefronts at night and, apparently with Vaseline smeared over his nude body, pressed himself against windows and doors. A radio station called the person “the buttcheek bandit” (although some speculate there may also be a copycat). Asked Valentine police chief Ben McBride, “Who in their right mind would do something like that?” |
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News of the Weird - |
Least Competent Persons
Ronald Stach, 41, climbed to the roof of the Canton Station bar in Baltimore on Dec. 11 and remained until Christmas Day, protesting the poor showing of the Baltimore Ravens football team. As such, Stach called attention not just to the Ravens, but also to himself, and thus inadvertently alerted his former wife as to his whereabouts so that she could renew her years-long quest for at least $40,000 in back child support. Kelly Stach said she was especially incensed at a TV interview in which Ronald lamented how much money he had spent on Ravens memorabilia. Shortly after that, a second woman came forward, claiming Ronald also owed her $12,000 in back child support. |
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News of the Weird - |
Burying an Election
Lee Myung-bak was elected president of South Korea in December, with experts in “poonsgoo” (similar to the Chinese feng shui) attributing the victory in part to the favorable location of his ancestors’ graves, which is an important predictor of good fortune. Candidates not so lucky spent part of the campaign moving their ancestors’ remains to better sites. Former president Kim Dae-jung is said to have learned the hard way, losing an earlier election with poor burial location, then winning after moving some dead relatives around, according to a November Reuters dispatch. |
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News of the Weird - |
Prison Dogma
In December, inmate Michael Polk (serving time for robbery and aggravated assault) filed a federal lawsuit against the Utah Department of Corrections for denying him the right to properly practice his religion, Asatru. According to its teachings, adherents must communicate with ancient Nordic gods (such as Odin, Thor and Heimdal) and for that, it is crucial that they have a Thor’s Hammer, a Mead Horn (for drinking Wassail), a drum of wood and boar skin, a “rune staff,” and a sword (though Polk graciously said he would accept a cardboard sword). |
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News of the Weird - |
Pink Justice
In parts of India’s Uttar Pradesh state, according to a November BBC News dispatch, women are hopelessly oppressed by poverty, abusive husbands and corrupt officials, but two years ago, Ms. Sampat Pal Devi became fed up. She organized bands of vigilante women (with several hundred members), dressed in pink saris, to protect their sisters using both nonviolence (heaping public shame on wrongdoers) and violence (with axes and the traditional Indian stick, the “lathi”). Said Sampat Devi, “Village society in India … refuses to educate [women], marries them off too early [age 9, in her case], barters them for money. Village women need to study and become independent to sort it out themselves.” |
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News of the Weird - |
Flood Money
The Army Corps of Engineers announced with great fanfare in June that its repairs and upgrades of levees in the Lakeview neighborhood of New Orleans, following Hurricane Katrina, would allow the system to hold back a future storm’s flood waters even if the level rose more than 5 feet beyond the Katrina level. However, in November, the corps announced that because of a mistake in calculation (an engineer had used a “minus” sign when a “plus” sign was called for), the expensive levee repairs would actually protect against flooding only 6 inches above the Katrina level. |
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