Those hardy Floridians: Rudolph Jessie Hicks Jr., 30, was arrested
in Brooksville, Fla., for trespass, but not before he had gotten up from a police
dog takedown, five Taser shots, and an entire can of pepper spray (December).
And police in Port St. Lucie, Fla., were considering whether to charge Robin
Bush, who strangled a 130-pound Rottweiler after it would not let go of her
tiny Yorkie (December).
More things to worry about: 1) Police in Denton, Texas, arrested two
teenagers in October and charged them with robbing two visitors who were passing
through town from Montana; the victims said they were on their way to Baton
Rouge, La., because they needed money and had read on the Internet that a medical
school would pay $100,000 for testicles. 2) The Dutch retirement home Seniorenpand,
in Rotterdam, bills itself as the world’s only old-age community for incorrigible
heroin addicts and has a long waiting list for its few rooms, according to a
December dispatch in The Scotsman. (One satisfied resident bragged that
he had some “pretty good stuff” the night before.)
Ironies: A 59-year-old veteran NASCAR driver from Scottsdale, Ariz.,
was killed in November when he fell off of a Segway scooter (going 5 mph) at
a Las Vegas go-cart race and hit his head. And in China’s Guangxi Zhuang region
in September, five people asphyxiated while conducting a ceremony in a dangerous
lead mine (frequently shut down by the government), including a prominent feng
shui expert there to advise on improving harmonic energy flow. And in Aliquippa,
Pa., in October, a 28-year-old man was electrocuted on his first day at work
as an electrician.
Unclear on the concept: In November, Jens Orback, Sweden’s minister
for integration and gender equality, who had been under fire for not being aggressive
on the job, denied on the radio program “Ekot” that he was intolerant of sexual
minorities. Said Orback: “I had a wonderful aunt who lived in Canada with a
horse. I thought it was wonderful. Let people live as they wish.” Later, attempting
to explain himself, Orback insisted that the aunt’s relationship with the horse
was platonic.
Super-tolerant people: A St. Paul Pioneer Press reporter, interviewing
neighbors of the people who shared a St. Croix Falls, Wis., home that was condemned
after being overrun with 450 cats, found that most neighbors had failed to notice
the house’s putrid smell. Several said that the awful odor from the neighborhood’s
fish hatchery and the awful odor of the neighborhood’s sewage treatment plant
probably overrode the awful odor of the house.
Least competent people: A 39-year-old man in Chillicothe, Ohio, was
hospitalized in December after an unsuccessful suicide attempt that accidentally
blew his own house to pieces and did heavy damage to neighboring homes. The
man had turned on the natural gas to kill himself, but then realized that other
houses might be in danger, and just as he dashed to the basement to turn off
the electricity, the house exploded (probably from an electrical spark) and
was leveled. A month before, the man had tried to kill himself with automobile
exhaust and a garden hose, but his car ran out of gas before he could die, and
he then hooked up a propane tank for the same purpose, but once again, he outlived
his fuel supply.
Recurring themes: News of the Weird reported as far back as 1998
on optimistic pet owners preparing to pay large sums for a cloned model of a
deceased dog or cat, mentioning a lab at Texas A&M University planning to clone
a collie-husky named Missy (who was, of course, according to her owners, “perfect”).
The lab’s Dr. Mark Westhusin and his team managed to clone its first dog, “cc,”
in 2001, and has subsequently cloned cattle, goats, pigs and a cat. In December
2004, another outfit, Genetic Savings and Clone (of Sausalito, Calif., and Madison,
Wis.), announced that it had delivered a kitten to a woman for $50,000 that
is a DNA replica of Nicky, a cat that died last year at age 17.
2004 CHUCK SHEPHERD
This article appears in Jan 12-18, 2005.
