Content-Type: text/plain Mime-Version: 1.0 (NeXT Mail 3.3 v118.2) From: Peter Langston <psl> Date: Tue, 4 Nov 97 23:23:03 -0800 To: Fun_People Precedence: bulk Subject: Weirdness [503] - 26Sep97 Excerpted-from: WEIRDNUZ.503 (News of the Weird, September 26, 1997) by Chuck Shepherd * One of the four annual Pennsylvania rattlesnake-bagging tournaments was held in June in Curwensville. Teams of two amateurs who have paid an entry fee race the clock in an 8-foot-by- 8 bit (it's a 3-second penalty if it draws blood), but, said one contestant, "Why do something sissy, like play golf?" Said another, "It's [only] $5 to get in [here, but] $100 for cocaine. This is a whole lot cheaper." * To publicize an April poetry show at the Hyperdisc coffee house in Los Angeles, poet-psychiatrist Robert Carroll released one of his recent pieces, entitled "Am I Really Going to Veg Out in Front of the TV Again Tonight?" The text of the poem is: "Yes." * Sculptor Anthony-Noel Kelly, who works in the medium of corpses and severed body parts, was arrested in London in April on suspicion of illegal possession of cadavers that he received through an associate in the Royal College of Surgeons. Kelly is a cousin of the Duke of Norfolk, and some of the 30 human body parts police seized were found at his family's ancestral castle in Kent. Kelly formerly worked as a butcher. *"). * In February, after his conviction in Nashville, Tenn., for drug trafficking, Clemmie Jones, 35, complained to a federal judge that he was upset by the circumstances of his arrest. Jones had been the object of a manhunt that sheriff's deputies grew so intense about that they had T-shirts made with photos of Jones on the front and his wife on the back, and were wearing them when they collared Jones. Said Jones to the judge, "I felt as though I was being targeted." * In July, police in Lexington, Ky., were searching for Delbert Buttrey, 47, who they believe is the man who. ["'Okay,' he said, 'paint my house.'" -psl] * The February Scientific American reported on how conservation biologist Joel Berger (University of Nevada at Reno) field-studies moose, which are notoriously unfriendly to humans. Berger needed to be able to hurl fresh bear and wolf dung accurately enough to assure that a moose immediately smelled it, to see if it made the moose fearful or aggressive. To be able to get that close to a moose, he engaged a designer who worked on the movie "Star Wars" to make a moose suit, which worked so well that Berger said he spent much of his time in the suit worrying about being mounted. * In March, a 36-year-old man choked to death on a 6-inch tropical fish he had popped into his mouth while showing off for friends in Bayou Vista, La. And in April, a 12-year-old boy was electrocuted in East Palo Alto, Calif., after he climbed a high-voltage transmission tower in the rain, dared his three companions to join him, and then accidentally touched a wire. And in July, a 22-year- old man, described by his grandmother as "smart in school," died in a bungee-cord accident on a railroad trestle in Fairfax County, Va. (Said a police spokesman: "The length of the cord that he had assembled was greater than the distance between the trestle and the ground.") Copyright 1997 by Universal Press Syndicate.