Category: News of the Weird

Lead Story About two dozen committed Christians arrived at Cherokee Lodge, a nudist resort near Crossville, Tennessee, in June for a semiannual retreat called the Christian Nudist Convocation. According to an August story in the Nashville Scene, Christian nudists routinely encounter disapproval not only from other Christians, who see going naked as incompatible with their […]

Lead Story In the Pacific archipelago nation of Vanuatu, the government’s drive to develop a Western-style financial system has created difficulties for citizens living in isolated villages, who typically use little or no cash and employ handmade or naturally occurring objects as currency. But the Tari Bunia Bank, according to a July BBC News dispatch, […]

Lead Story The crazy-mouse race heats up: In July researchers at Johns Hopkins announced that they had become the first to genetically engineer mice that suffer from a mild form of schizophrenia. Three weeks later, a team led by scientists at Duke University announced that they’d used genetic engineering to breed mice with obsessive-compulsive disorder […]

Lead Story At a hearing last month in children’s court in Perth, Australia, a 12-year-old girl was sentenced to two months’ detention for an incident in which she stole a Toyota Land Cruiser and led police on a 50-minute chase through rush hour traffic at speeds of up to 90 miles per hour. The judge […]

Lead Story Shortly after moving into a Vancouver condominium apartment in June, Miles Nurse and Jennifer Plomt discovered that (a) the unit was infested with bats and (b) British Columbia law prohibits disturbing the animals during their breeding period, meaning they likely couldn’t be relocated until the end of August. According to a Vancouver Sun […]

Lead Story Security camera footage taken one May afternoon at the Union Station mall in Kansas City revealed that a small boy had wandered away from his mother, noticed an elaborate half-completed mandala rendered on the floor in colored sand by a visiting group of Tibetan Buddhist monks, and begun to dance around on it, […]

Lead Story After ten years of trying, Roger Tullgren of Hassleholm, Sweden, recently succeeded in having his consuming interest in heavy-metal music officially classified as a disability. According to June accounts in the Swedish press, after the 42-year-old was fired from his last job for repeated absences–he plays in two metal bands and attends hundreds […]

Lead Story The UK’s Daily Mail reported in June on zoologist Brady Barr and a recent documentary shoot for National Geographic in which he infiltrated a colony of Tanzanian crocodiles by donning a 13-foot-long crocodile suit. Made of fiberglass, aluminum, canvas, and Kevlar, the suit allowed Barr to crawl around undetected on Nile riverbanks frequented […]

Lead Story With small vineyards in the Languedoc region of southern France struggling to compete with cheaper imported wine, a group of extremist winemakers known as the Crav issued a video ultimatum in May: seven men in ski masks read a prepared statement warning new president Nicolas Sarkozy that “blood will flow” if the government […]

Lead Story When 20-year-old Andres Vasquez of Verona, Kentucky, called 911 late one night in May, he told the dispatcher he was trapped beneath a car someone had thrown on him; only later did he allegedly acknowledge that he might have been drunk and caused the crash himself. One crucial part of Vasquez’s story, however, […]

Lead Story Among the positions cited in Popular Science’s “Worst Jobs in Science” list for 2007, from the magazine’s July issue: whale-feces researcher (guided by trained dogs, teams locate floating fields of oily dung, scoop it up with nets, and pack the chunks in ice for later study), elephant vasectomist (to cut the appropriate tube […]

Lead Story The Anchorage Daily News reported in May on new efforts to minimize contact between grizzly bears and the thousands of visitors who fish Alaska’s Russian River each summer. Officials sometimes deem it necessary to kill specific bears known for menacing humans, but after an encounter witnesses often have trouble describing the bear in […]

Lead Story Der Spiegel reported in May on objectophilia, or sexual and romantic attraction to specific inanimate objects. A 41-year-old objectophile identified as Joachim A.–who said he began his first long-term objectophilic relationship, with a Hammond organ, at age 12–distinguished those like him from mere fetishists, who he said view objects as means to their […]

Lead Story The New York Times and the Associated Press reported in April on surgical procedures in which doctors avoid making major incisions by instead accessing the inside of the body through pre-existing orifices. Inspired in part by an appendectomy performed in India in 2004 via the patient’s mouth (though watching a video of the […]

Lead Story In January 39-year-old Ronald Dotson of Detroit was sentenced to 18 months in prison for an October incident in which police reportedly found him trying to break into a storefront displaying a mannequin in a French maid’s outfit. The Detroit Free Press reported that this was Dotson’s seventh mannequin-related offense since 1993, when […]