Too Weird for Color TV

Once in a while I get a kick out of browsing websites reporting weird news around the world. Hard to tell how much if any of certain stories is true, but that doesn’t necessarily deflate the laugh that many of the stories produce. For the same reason tabloids at the supermarket checkout are always on my radar and on visits to my barber flipping through The Globe and laughing at the stuff they pull up is always fun.

I found a new place to get crazy news, a website with a huge archive named News of the Weird. Below are a few of the stories from their latest discoveries.

A fifty-three year-old man with failing eyesight who had recently undergone intestinal surgery told Sonoma, California police that on May 1, a woman came to his home and instructed him to drop his pants and lay face down on the bed so that she could administer an enema. He said he assumed his doctor had sent her and so he complied. It was over in two minutes, and she was gone. The man’s doctor later said he had no idea who the woman was. This home invasion brings to mind a series of incidents in the Champaign, Illinois area when a man operated in a similar fashion as the “Illinois Enema Bandit.” Frank Zappa was inspired to write “Illinois Enema Bandit Blues” based on this case.

Several funeral homes in the United States have drive-thru windows to serve rushed mourners, or those stressed by the funeral parlor experience. “Not quite as emotional,” said one visitor to the Robert L. Adams Mortuary in Compton, California, referring to the need not to linger in the queue of bereaved, idling motorists. The Adams facility was even more popular during the peak of gang murders in the area, according to an April Los Angeles Times report, because the drive-thru window’s bulletproof glass offered protection from the dangerous indoor service where gangbangers tried to desecrate their late rivals’ corpses.

Cat Failing to Know Its Role: In Cleveland, Texas, a man had to be airlifted to an emergency trauma unit after losing a fight with a house cat. Though he was armed with a knife as he took on the beast, somehow the attacking cat caused him to lose his balance and fall on the blade.

An unidentified man told police in Niles, Illinois that he had been victimized by a medical exam, which was conducted in an otherwise abandoned office, by a lone “doctor” wearing a white lab coat, who used toothpicks for acupuncture pressure points, and who dispensed a container of pills labeled “dietary supplements” with an expiration date of February 2002. The man said he paid $200 but is not sure he got his money’s worth.

In a widely reported story originating in the Brazilian press, thirty-six year-old accountant Ana Catarian Bezerra, a sufferer of severe anxiety and hyper-sexuality was said to have won her April court battle to be allowed breaks during the workday to masturbate.

And from another interesting website, Stunning Stuff, comes this story of a dog…

A dog that often jumped out the window of his owners’ ground-floor apartment jumped out of the window of their new flat forgetting it was six floors up. Fortunately the lucky dog was saved when it landed on a balcony three floors down from the apartment in Cologne, Germany. The dog’s owners Udo and Angela Baecker called the fire department when they heard their pet boxer whining from the balcony below. They couldn’t get him themselves because the tenants were away on vacation. “We've only been in the new apartment for a week, but thought TJ would have got used to it after climbing up all the stairs. We never thought he’d try his usual trick of jumping from the window to get into the garden,” said Angela.

From the same site comes news that turtles can breathe through their butts, and that Marilyn Monroe had six toes on one foot.