Thursday, May. 05, 2011

News of the Weird for May 5, 2011

Chuck Shepherd

 

Cultural Diversity

- In January, while the Texas Legislature debated budget cuts that would almost certainly cost Allen High School (just north of Dallas) at least $18 million and require layoffs of teachers and other school personnel, construction was continuing on the school's new $60 million football stadium. Noted a New York Times report on the stadium (which 63 percent of voters approved in a 2009 bond referendum), "(O)nly football supersedes faith and family (among Texans)."

Latest Religous Messages

- Former stripper Crystal Deans, who said she learned the trade at age 18 but later retired and turned to God for help through a rough patch of her life, now offers free pole-dancing classes in Spring, Texas, near Houston, expressly for Christian women. Her gyrations may be the same as when she was working, she said, but now everyone is clothed, and she dances only to "Christian music."

- Youth pastor Brent Girouex, 31, was urged to confess by his minister in Council Bluffs, Iowa, in February to an apparently lengthy series of sexual experiences with boys and young men, which he initiated by suggesting that ejaculating would help the victims gain "sexual purity" by (as he explained to detectives) "getting rid of the evil thoughts in their mind." Eight victims reported multiple purification sessions, with one estimating as many as 100.

Questionable Judgments

- For Career Day in April at Shady Grove Elementary School in Henrico, Va., kids heard a local plastic surgeon describe his specialty, but not until afterward did parents learn that the surgeon had brought along as props saline breast implants (which he passed around for the kids to handle). Many parents were outraged, and even one calmer parent commented, "Career Day sure isn't what it once was."

- Marie Stopes International is a prominent London charity that robustly promotes a woman's right to choose abortion, but a whimsical public service campaign in January has created unusually savage criticism. The organization partnered with the British comedy music band The Midnight Beast to produce a video suggesting anal sex as a contraceptive of choice. Among the lyrics of one song, "One up the bum, and it's no harm done/One up the bum, and you won't be a mum."

Least Competent Criminals

- A man stole Waltham, Mass., student Mark Bao's notebook computer in March, but Bao used his automatic online-backup service to access the hard drive while the thief was using it, to discover a performance video of a man (presumably the thief) dancing (lamely, thought Bao) to a pop song. Bao uploaded the video to YouTube - where 700,000 viewers showed it the proper disrespect - and also tracked down the thief's e-mail address and informed him of his new Internet "stardom." Shortly afterward, the still-unidentified thief turned in the notebook to Bentley University police with an apology to "Mark,"begging him to take down the video.

Names in the News

- Arrested in Aurora, Colo., in January and charged with stalking his wife: Joseph Moron. Appointed to a senior executive position in January in the global communications firm Alcatel-Lucent: George Nazi. Arrested for dealing marijuana in March in Fairfax County, Va.: Kevin Lee Cokayne. Appointed as interim chief medical officer of Newhall Memorial Hospital in Santa Clarita, Calif., in March: Dr. Richard Frankenstein. Arrested for DUI in April by a California Highway Patrolman ("ChiP"): Eric Estrada (not the actor). Posthumously rejected as the namesake for the new government office center in Fort Wayne, Ind., in March: former Fort Wayne Mayor Harry Baals (pronounced "bales" by his descendants but always "balls" by Mr. Baals, himself).

Visit Chuck Sehpherd daily at NewsoftheWeird.blogspot.com or www.NewsoftheWeird.com. Send your Weird News to WeirdNewsTips@yahoo.com.