Can't Make Up

A New York Daily News investigation revealed in March that the Postal Service has spent at least $3.6 million of stamp buyers' money in recent years sending its Inspector General staff through a series of executive conferences that featured exercises in wrapping each other in toilet paper and aluminum foil, building sand castles in freezing weather at the beach, and freely making animal noises, all because the conference sponsors convinced Inspector General Karla Corcoran that those exercises would improve job performance and make the staff work together better. Other therapeutic tasks included dressing in cat costumes and asking make-believe wizards for advice. [New York Daily News, 3-9-03] 

A 36-year-old man from Arcadia, Fla., checked himself into a counseling clinic in March after being identified as the one who had been pretending in public to be choking on food and persuading women to grasp him in the Heimlich maneuver, after which he would hug them lavishly and attempt clumsily to develop a relationship. A sheriff's spokesman in Charlotte County, site of the most recent reports, said the man probably had done nothing illegal. 

Belgian actor Benjamin Verdonck lived nearly naked in a cage with a pig in Ghent for three days in November hoping the pig would "teach" him why there is such strife in the world (results not reported). And James Albert Ernest Togo, 20, of Brisbane, arrested for mooning a policeman, claimed in December that Australia's Constitution gave him the right to stick out his bare buttocks in political protest, which he said was part of his Aboriginal tradition. And in October, in the midst of a People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals anti-milk demonstration at an Aberdeen, Scotland, high school, about 100 milk-loving students spent 10 minutes angrily drenching PETA's cow-costumed spokesman with milk.

Gerald F. Berg gave police a false name when stopped, saying he had left his wallet at home, but when police spotted the wallet in Berg's pants pocket, along with methamphetamine, Berg quickly professed confusion, telling police that the pants he was wearing weren't his (Spokane, Wash., October). And when Marcus J. Thomas, 20, who was being discharged from jail, was discovered to have eight rocks of crack cocaine in his rectum, he quickly told police that the drugs weren't his (La Crosse, Wis., February). [Spokesman-Review, 10-3-02] [La Crosse Tribune, 2-17-03]

Police in Warren, Ohio, arrested Roger A. Hunt, 41, on New Year's Day and charged him with kidnapping his girlfriend, despite his story that the couple were just blissfully headed out to dinner in his truck. Police said their suspicions were aroused when they noticed that the woman was barefoot and Hunt tried to explain that by saying, "She's from Virginia. She doesn't wear shoes (when she goes out to dinner)." [Tribune-Chronicle (Warren), 1-3-03]

Robert Paul Rice, serving 1 to 15 years in Utah State Prison, had filed a lawsuit demanding that the prison accommodate him as a vampire by providing special "vampire" meals and conjugal visits that would allow him to partake "in the vampiric sacrament" ("drinking blood"), but an appeals court turned him down in October. A prison spokesman said that no one gets conjugal visits in Utah, blood-drinking or otherwise. [Deseret News-AP, 10-28-02]

The Transportation Security Administration revealed in March that, in the last 12 months, airline passengers at U.S. airports had been found by screeners to have tried to board with 4.8 million prohibited items, including 1.4 million knives, 1,100 guns, 125,000 incendiary items and 40,000 box-cutters. And in February, a 45-year-old Japanese tourist attempted to board a flight at Miami International Airport carrying a canister of gasoline, two boxes of matches and a barbecue grill, and he was taken into custody when he refused to give them up. [CNN-AP, 3-10-03] [CNN-AP, 2-18-03]

University of Manitoba professor Rod Yellon's appeal of his 1998 traffic ticket for running a stop sign (reported in News of the Weird last year) was rejected in February, and it appears he will now have to pay the fine, equal to about US$35. Yellon's strategy alternated between complaining of being oppressed and boycotting court proceedings, and in fact he was convicted in absentia. He refuses to pay the ticket because he thinks the word "stop" on a stop sign is too vague and that the government should set precisely calibrated standards of what it means to "stop." [Winnipeg Free Press, 2-26-03]