Chutzpah!: The Miami Herald reported in April that BellSouth called state Rep. Julio Robaina three times by cell phone on the floor of the Florida Legislature during debate on a massive telephone rate increase and ordered him to abandon his Democratic Party cohorts and vote for it; BellSouth had influence with Robaina because for the nine months a year that the Florida Legislature is not in session, Robaina is an installer for BellSouth. He was described as close to tears at BellSouth's lobbying. And in Tennessee in January, state Sen. John Ford, faced with a claim for increased child support from the mother of his 9-year-old daughter, formally challenged the constitutionality of the state's child-support rules; among the rules challenged, however, were those ushered through the state General Assembly last year by Ford himself.
Unclear on the concept: In March in Hartford, Conn., Rebecca Messier, who was convicted with her husband, Joseph, in 1998 of giving $8,500 to a prosecutor to get a lenient sentence, petitioned in Superior Court to get her $8,500 back. And Jeffrey Cameron Fitzhenry, 17, was arrested in Palm Desert, Calif., in May after walking into a clinic with a 9 mm handgun and shooting his girlfriend because she was about to abort his baby.
Police blotter: From a police report quoted in Seattle's newsweekly The Stranger (April 29): "(A) witness stated that he and another witness watched the suspect walk up to several different men (at the University Book Store on the University of Washington campus), get on his knees, and sniff their anuses. He would then lean forward as though he was getting a book off the lower shelf. (One witness) also said that when one male got up from a bench and walked away, the suspect walked over and started smelling the area where the male had been sitting. When the witnesses confronted the suspect about the incidents, the suspect said, "Sometimes I forget myself and get carried away.'"The May robber of a Bank of America branch in St. Mary, Fla. (near Orlando), was still at large at press time, but police released the surveillance tape showing the man in a bright Hawaiian print shirt, holding his newly acquired stash to his lips and kissing it, before making his getaway.
Least competent criminals: Teresa Jones Smith, 44, was arrested in Lexington, N.C., in January after trying to spring her incarcerated boyfriend, Roger Johnson, from jail. According to deputies, Smith, who had been seated across from Johnson at a visiting room bench, was found with a mini blowtorch and other tools trying to cut through the Plexiglas shield that separates prisoners from visitors, but more smoke was created than she was prepared for.
Update: News of the Weird reported in 2002 and 2003 on ever-more-daring exploits of "extreme ironing" athletes, who set up boards and press creases under competitively difficult circumstances, such as while sailboarding or bouncing on a trampoline. Several British "ironists" made a publicity tour of the United States in May in their campaign to make their obsession an Olympic sport. (Events are now judged at 120 points each, half of which is based on the quality of the pressing.) Founder Phil Shaw said he got the idea one day in 1997 when he faced a load of wrinkled shirts and thought he would be less bored if he hooked up a long extension cord and ironed while he went rock-climbing.
2004 CHUCK SHEPHERD