News of the Weird, December 11, 2011
Chuck Shepherd
by Chuck Shepherd
Copyright 2011 by Chuck Shepherd. All rights reserved.
Lead Story
* Chinese Education Values: To get to their school, 80 children
(aged 6 to 17) in the mountaintop village of Pili, China, near the
borders with Tajikistan and Afghanistan, make a 120-mile journey
that includes 50 miles on foot or by camel. The most dangerous
parts of the route are an inches-wide path cut into a cliff (over a
1,000-foot drop), a 600-foot-long zip-line drop, and crossings of
four freezing rivers (easier in winter when they are frozen solid).
The kids must make the chaperoned treks four times a year--coming
and going for each of two long sessions. According to one teacher,
Ms. Su, the kids generally enjoy the adventure. The government is
building a road to the village, but it will not be finished until 2013.
[Daily Telegraph (London), 11-15-2011]
Cultural Diversity
* Globally (except in Japan), family-run businesses underperform
those run by professional managers. Japanese corporations seem
often to have a talented son to take over for his father. The main
reason for that, according to an August Freakonomics radio report,
is that the family scions usually first recruit an ideal "son" and then
adopt him, often also encouraging their daughters to marry the men.
(Japanese adage: "You can't choose your sons, but you can choose
your sons-in-law.") If the man is already married, sometimes he
and his wife will both get adopted.) In fact, while 98 percent of
U.S. adoptions are of children, 98 percent of Japan's are of adults.
[Freakonomics.com, 8-9-2011]
* At an October ceremony in the Satara district in India's
Maharashtra state, 285 girls were allowed to change their names, as
each of them had originally been named the Hindi word "Nakusa,"
which translates to "unwanted" (expressing their parents'
disappointment at not having had a son). In Satara, only 881 girls
are born for every 1,000 boys, reportedly the result of abortion,
given the expense of raising a girl (whose family is expected to pay
for any wedding and give a dowry to the groom's family). [Yahoo-
AP, 10-22-2011]
* Swedish Judges Get Tough: (1) A court dismissed charges
against two 20-year-old men in October, accused of having bared a
passed-out, 18-year-old woman's breasts at a party and taken
photographs. Since the woman was not "aware" that she was being
molested, the act was not a crime, ruled the Stockholm District
Court. (2) Also in October, the Falun District Court in central
Sweden convicted 23 women of possession of "large quantities" of
child pornography but gave them suspended sentences, merely
fining them in amounts as low as the equivalent of $375. Their
male "ringleader" was sentenced to one year in prison. [The Local
(Stockholm), 10-21-2011] [Agence France-Presse, 10-18-2011]
* Dubai is a city of towering, architecturally brilliant skyscrapers,
but since all were built only in the last several decades, the city's
central sewer system has not been able to keep up. Consequently,
reported NPR's "Fresh Air" in November, only a few are hooked up
to the municipal system, and the remainder must hire fleets of
tanker trucks to carry away the waste water. The trucks then must
queue up, sometimes for 24 hours at a time, to dispose of it at
treatment plants. [NPR, 11-7-2011]
Latest Religious Messages
* Factory worker Billy Hyatt, who was fired in 2009 by north
Georgia plastics company Pliant Corp., filed a lawsuit in August
alleging illegal religious discrimination. Pliant (now called Berry
Plastics) required its employees to wear stickers indicating the
number of consecutive accident-free days, and March 12, 2009, was
the 666th day. When Hyatt refused to wear "the mark of the beast"
(embracing that number, he thought, would condemn him to Hell),
he was suspended and then fired. [CBS News-AP, 11-18-2011]
* The International House of Prayer in Kansas City, Mo., recently
celebrated 12 consecutive years of around-the-clock musical
praying, which Pastor Mike Bickle and his evangelical congregation
believe is necessary to fight the devil's continuous infiltration of the
realms of power in society (business, media, government, etc.). "To
keep the music going," according to an October Los Angeles Times
dispatch, "the church has 25 bands playing throughout the week in
two-hour sets," divided between "devotional" music and
"intercessions," in which God is petitioned to help some cause or
place. Bickle claims that there are "thousands" of 24/7 prayer
groups in the world. [Los Angeles Times, 10-14-2011]
* Israelis lately experience attacks not just from the outside but
from its own ultra-Orthodox communities (about 10 percent of the
country, and growing), whose activists have jeered and stoned
"immodestly" dressed women and girls (as young as 6) on the street,
defaced women's images on billboards, forced illegal gender
segregation in public facilities (including buses and sidewalks), and
vandalized businesses that treat women as equals (such as one ice-
cream shop--since female customers lick the cones in public). An
especially violent minority, the Sikrikim, employ some tactics
reminiscent of the Ku Klux Klan in America. [The Guardian
(London), 11-15-2011; Reuters, 10-18-2011]
Questionable Judgments
* Each August in Urakawa, Japan, a "hallucination and delusion
competition" takes place among visiting alcoholics and sufferers of
mental disorders, who in principle are helped by bonding with
fellow patients and revealing their failures and successes. The
"Bethel Festival," named for its sponsor, brings about 600 people
together for on-stage presentations (sometimes in the form of song
or dance) and awards a grand prize to a standout visitor (one year, to
a woman who lived for four days in a public restroom after a voice
in her head told her to, and in another year, to a man who had
overcome a 35-year-stretch of never straying more than two yards
from his mother). (Some mental-disorder professionals believe the
Festival is too-easily-mockable by insensitive outsiders.) [Mainichi
Daily News, 9-9-2011]
Bright Ideas
* How does an extortionist (or kidnaper) safely collect the money
that has been dropped off for him? In July, police staking out a
vacant field in Colerain Township, Ohio, after leaving the $22.000
ordered by alleged extortionist Frank Pence, waited for about an
hour, but Pence failed to show. Then, one officer noticed the
money slowly moving across the field and finally caught up to
Pence, who was pulling a very, very long, partially-concealed rope
from a location a distance from the drop site. [Cincinnati.com, 10-
21-2011]
Creme de la Weird
* Authorities in Washington County, Ore., said in October that they
would not file charges against a very weird 21-year-old woman who
had felt compelled, as a tribute to her horse that had just died of old
age, to get naked and climb inside the horse's carcass, to "feel one"
with it. Her boyfriend recorded the extremely bloody adventure
with numerous photographs (many showing her smiling joyously),
which made their way onto the Internet and available to any viewers
with strong stomachs. Said deputy Sgt. Dave Thompson, "At some
point in your career, you say, yeah, I've seen a lot of bad stuff [and]
you see this kind of picture and you realize maybe you haven't seen
everything." [KOIN-TV (Portland), 10-27-2011]
Least Competent Criminal
* A lawyer's first rule of cross-examination is to never ask a
question you don't already know the answer to, but criminal
defendants who act as their own lawyers typically did not get that
memo. Philome Cesar, charged with about 25 robberies in the
Allentown, Pa., area, began questioning his alleged victims at his
trial in November. Please describe, he asked the first, what the
robber sounded like. Answered victim Daryl Evans, "He sounded
like you." After Cesar asked a second victim the same question,
and received the same answer, he decided to stop cross-examining
the victims. (He was convicted of 19 counts.) [Morning Call
(Allentown), 11-15-2011; Express-Times (Easton, Pa.), 11-18-
2011]
A News of the Weird Classic (January 2006)
* In New Braunfels, Tex., in November [2005], Robert Villarreal,
34, was sentenced to 50 years in prison after he sold drugs to the
same undercover officer for the third time in a 14-year period. He
had actually argued "entrapment," claiming that for the first sale, in
1988, he was so young (age 18) that he shouldn't be expected to
remember later what the officer looked like. [New Braunfels
Herald-Zeitung, 11-3-05]
Thanks This Week to Lance Allen and Kathryn Wood and
to the News of the Weird Board of Editorial Advisors.
*****
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