So begins another week at the saw mill. In honor of Mondays everywhere, here are ten (true) vignettes abridged from News of the Weird to help you launch your day.
1. You only get one mom
In a heartwarming climax to an adopted son’s emotional search for his birth mother who gave him up for adoption 33 years ago, a Kansas man managed to track down his mom (Vivian Wheeler, 62) in Bakersfield, California. Vivian is retired — as a circus-sideshow “bearded lady.” The man said he can see their similarities despite his mother’s beard, which she keeps groomed to a length of 11 inches.
2. Sports fans over the line
Marie Murphy, a fifth-grade teacher, and her husband lost almost everything in a house fire in April, but when she arrived at her burning home she defied firefighters and dashed inside to retrieve a single prized possession: her Philadelphia Phillies season tickets. Later a Phillies representative informed her the team would have reprinted her tickets free.
Australian soccer fan Justin Witcombe, 31, showed a reporter in Geelong full body tattoos of his three idols in life: boxer Mike Tyson, the rock group KISS, and his local Collingwood soccer team, whose mascot – a magpie named Jock “One Eye” McPie — is inked prominently on Witcombe’s, um, manhood.
3. Two bits, four bits
A six-year-old Michigan girl was kicked off a flag football cheerleading squad after complaining to her mother about the saucy language of one of the cheers in the girls’ repertoire: “Our backs ache!/Our skirts are too tight!/We shake our booties!/From left to right!” The team, given the chance to renounce the cheer, voted to keep it. Instead they bounced the little girl for taking the dispute public.
4. Bright ideas
New York gubernatorial candidate Carl Paladino, waging a particularly contentious campaign, mailed out a flier that suggested Democratic state politicians are corrupt. The flier had photos of seven of that party’s current and recent office-holders on a special odor-triggering paper that releases a “garbage-scented” smell when exposed to air which grows more foul over time.
5. A new branch office
Sherin Brown, 23, was walking through a Brooklyn neighborhood when a tractor-trailer accidentally clipped a light pole and sent it crashing to the sidewalk. First responders found Brown pinned under the pole, screaming for help, and had her taken to a hospital. Investigators discovered a nearby surveillance camera that revealed Brown had stepped out of the way of the falling pole but then, with no one else around, crawled underneath and began wailing in “pain,” perhaps in anticipation of a future lawsuit.
6. Smoke signals
A man who lives outside South Fulton, Tenn., was offered firefighter service by the city for an annual $75 fee but declined to pay. In September his home burned to the ground while firefighters stood by watching. They were called to the scene by a neighbor, who had paid the fee and feared the fire might spread to his property.
7. Nice try, Dad
Donald Denney and his father concocted a plan on the telephone for Dad to smuggle the son a ball of black-tar heroin into a Colorado prison for eventual resale. The exchange would be made during visiting hours, passed through the mouth by a deep kiss from a female visitor. As life often dictates, Dad could not find a woman with a clean-enough record to be admitted as a visitor. Enamored with the plan, the father decided to be the drug mule. He inserted the packaged heroin into his rectum for later transfer to his mouth (even though the eventual deep kiss would be awkward). Despite audio warnings, father and son forgot that all the son’s phone calls were being monitored. Prison officials were waiting for the father, with a body-cavity search warrant, as he entered the prison. The moral of the story: The truth always comes out in the end.
8. Mean streets: Chicago & Harlem
A 23-year-old man from Chicago’s south side was shot twice in one day—by different people in different neighborhoods. After being shot above the armpit shortly after midnight, he was treated at the hospital and released. Ten hours later he was shot again in the leg and returned to the same hospital.
During a shootout in New York City, Angel Alvarez, 23, was brought down in a hail of gunfire and taken to Harlem Hospital. Doctors saved his life despite 21 bullet wounds; his lawyer claims there were 23. Alvarez’s sister called her brother’s miraculous survival, “Ridiculous.”
9. Creative surgery
Doctors from the UC-San Diego and the University of Washington announced they can handle certain brain surgeries by drilling holes in the nose and eye socket. These innovations follow recent inroads performing kidney removal and gall bladder surgery not by traditional abdominal incisions but through, respectively, the vagina and anus. Call me old fashioned but ….
10. Waxing nostalgic: flashing back 15 years …
July 1995. Ellie Jenkins worked as a counter for the Savannah Mosquito Control Commission. Her job was to drive around to 38 specified locations and stand with her arms and legs spread … to see whether she’d be bitten five times in a minute—the threshold required to summon county spraying trucks. In theory she could get stuck 152 times a day and not call for spraying. God bless Ellie Jenkins. Twice is irritating to me.
June 1995. A Toledo Blade story reported on the work of Mike Pixley, paid to test La-Z-Boy chairs at the company plant in Monroe, Mich. Pixley rocks back and forth 2,800 times a day for $6 an hour. Supervisor Judy Fay praised Pixley as a self-motivated man who sets his own personal goals.
If Pixley can do it, we can do it. Keep a smile on your face, a bounce in your stride, and have a great week.