Bad week for barnyard animals: Austin Gullette, 45, was arrested Aug. 31 in West Monroe, La., after his sister caught him allegedly having sex with one of her three pigs. (A sheriff’s official in the West Monroe case said he had never before, in his 29-year career, seen a case of a man having sex with a pig, but then he added, to a Monroe News Star reporter, that of course there were cases involving men with “dogs, donkeys and sheep.”)
Life imitates Caddyshack: Christopher Lehan, 36 (an employee of the exclusive Sedgewood Golf Club in Kent, N.Y.), was arrested in September sitting in a golf cart at night with a flashlight and a 20-gauge shotgun, after he had allegedly shot three skunks that were menacing the grounds. He was charged with various hunting violations and with carrying a loaded firearm in a moving vehicle.
More cutting-edge research: University of Queensland (Australia) researchers told an entomology conference in August, after doing DNA “fingerprinting” of Nepalese and Inner Mongolian lice, that their team had disproved the apparently important general belief that body lice and head lice are separate species. And in September, Edward Cussler and Brian Gettelfinger, writing for a chemical engineering journal, showed that people swam no faster in water than in a substance twice as thick (after experiments in a pool to which “guar gum” had been added to the water to create something that, said Cussler, “looked like snot”).
Compelling explanations: Glen Paul Darby, contesting his drug conviction at the state Court of Appeal in Sydney, Australia, in September, argued that he not only was “searched” (sniffed) by a drug dog without probable cause but was also “assaulted” when the dog nudged Darby’s pants with his snout to indicate just where the drugs were. A civil liberties advocate argued that some people are unusually traumatized by a dog’s thrusting his snout against that area of the body.
Latest “rights,” explained: Homeowners are often startled to find that, in many states, if they give someone permission to stay with them for a while, and that guest eventually overstays his welcome, the homeowner can no longer easily eject the guest, or even have a sheriff do it, but rather must go through formal and lengthy eviction procedures. That issue surfaced most recently in Potomac, Md., when a retired social worker took in a down-on-her-luck 39-year-old woman who, after a series of testy exchanges between the two, repeatedly refused to leave, feeling immune from eviction until the law had run its course. In August, according to police, the guest, Susan L. Sachs, was charged with murdering her host.
Creme de la weird: The race for U.S. Senate in Oklahoma (to succeed the retiring Don Nickles) was described in the press in September as so close that independent, former Green Party candidate Sheila Bilyeu might take enough votes away from one or the other leading candidates as to influence the outcome. Bilyeu has gained notoriety in the last two decades by filing numerous lawsuits against the federal government (all eventually dismissed) demanding the removal of a radiolike device the military allegedly planted in her head in the 1970s. The device, she said, mostly sends her messages that are highly critical of her. She added in a later lawsuit that President Clinton had ordered her gassed and had stolen her dog.
Least competent criminals: A man named Ian Fleming, 33, was arrested in September in New York City after he attempted to deposit two bogus, computer-generated checks into his account at a Commerce Bank in Forest Hills, in the amounts of $5 billion and $6 billion. Police said that the week before, Fleming had succeeded in a trial run by depositing bogus checks in the amounts of $350 and $1,300 and thus probably felt he was ready to move on up.
2004 CHUCK SHEPHERD
This article appears in Oct 27 – Nov 1, 2004.
