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News of the Weird

LEAD STORy

■ Crime-fearing female pedestrians in Tokyo can soon protect themselves with fashion designer Aya Tsukioka’s skirt that opens into a realistic-looking (except made of fabric), full-size vending machine that she hopes thugs will pass right by. It’s one of several fanciful crime-avoiding creations of the genre that Japanese inventors are noted for, according to an October New York Times dispatch. Another, the “manhole bag,” resembles a sewer covering when laid on the ground but can hold a person’s valuables, again provided that the thug passes it up. Yet another is women’s wraparound sunglasses that are extra-dark so that even shy, eye-contact-avoiding females can stare, unobserved, at potential perverts in trains to guard against the ubiquitous groping.

More Things to Worry About

■ As several sightings were made around Washington, D.C., of dragonfly-looking bugs hovering in the air at political events, government agencies were denying that they had released any tiny surveillance robots, according to an October Washington Post investigation. “I look up and I’m like, ‘What the hell is that?’” asked a college student at an antiwar rally in Washington. “They looked kind of like dragonflies or little helicopters. But…those are not insects.” Several agencies and private entities admitted to the Post that they were trying to develop such devices, but no one took credit for having them in the air yet.

■ Air Safety: (1) Nepal Airlines, which was having technical trouble with one of its two Boeing 757s in August, announced that it had fixed the problem by sacrificing two goats to appease the Hindu sky god Akash Bhairab. (2) As passengers boarded a Vueling Airlines flight from Madrid, Spain, in June, they noticed that 29 of the 32 rows of seats on one side were out of service, but they could hardly have been comforted by the captain’s announcement that “(W)e have a safety problem with the door at the front. Don’t worry, it’s only a safety problem.” (No incidents were reported on the flight.)

■ School Security: (1) MJ Safety Solutions of Danvers, Mass., has developed a $195 bullet-proof backpack for students, using a lightweight, police-equipment-quality panel, and is seeking approvals from school boards to promote them, according to an August Boston Herald report. (2) Britain’s Bladerunner company has developed student jumpers and blazers lined with knife-resistant Kevlar, starting at the equivalent of about $260, according to an August BBC News story.

■ In August, representatives of New East Britain province in Papua New Guinea formally begged the forgiveness of the Fiji High Commissioner for incidents in 1875 when PNG tribes killed and ate Fijian missionaries who had come to spread Christianity. (In fact, the PNG spokespersons pointed out that “forgiveness” was a major tenet of the Christianity that PNG came to accept from the missionaries.)

■ Medical student Wes Pemberton was scheduled to be officially measured in October in Tyler, Texas, for his upcoming spot in the Guinness Book of World Records. He told KLTV that he has a leg hair 5.0 inches long, surpassing the incumbent record of 4.88 inches. Pemberton said that his prize hair is growing amidst other normal-length hair, and that he has been treating it with conditioner to keep it strong for the measuring.

Leading Economic Indicators

■ A new condominium development in New York City, near 11th Avenue and West 24th Street (with prices starting at $6.25 million), features in-unit garages, allowing the resident to drive into the En-Suite Sky Garage System at street level and be lifted to his own unit. Guests and residents who don’t own cars will just have to use the ordinary elevators.

Oops!

■ Spectacular Errors: (1) The Kuala Lumpur phone company Telekom Malaysia acknowledged in April that it mistakenly sent a bill for the equivalent of $218 trillion (that’s 218 followed by 12 zeroes) or 806.4 trillion ringgit. The account was for the late father of Yahaya Wahab, whose final bill should have been the equivalent of $23. (2) Jayantibhai Patel, 57, was arrested in Foster City, Calif., in October after admitting that he smacked his father in the head with a hammer, requiring his hospitalization. Patel told police that he wanted the father to be put in a nursing home, but was under the impression that only a hospital could assign him to one, and thus, he needed to get him into a hospital.

News That Sounds Like a Joke

■ (1) After some mild bickering during a delivery at a Wal-Mart in October in Indiana County, Pa., according to police, a Pepsi Cola route man allegedly repeatedly punched a Coca-Cola route man in the face. (2) Reuters reported in September that a 50-year-old man who bought two large sausages at a butcher shop in Mannheim, Germany, returned shortly afterward to have them wrapped for a flight to Dubai. On inspection, the butcher found that the man had stuffed each sausage with an anatomically correct latex dildo, for smuggling into Dubai.

People Different From Us

■ In September, Matt Wilkinson admitted to KGW-TV of Portland, Ore., that he had been in a coma for three days recently and nearly died after he decided to stick his pet Eastern diamondback rattlesnake into his mouth while drinking with some buddies: “Me, being me, I put his head in my mouth.” A doctor told the station that Wilkinson barely made it to the hospital in time because his airway had nearly swollen shut from the venomous bites. Wilkinson said that the incident was “kind of” his “own stupid fault.”

Least Competent People

■ (1) Coast Guard officials said they rescued Louis Pasquale, 35, near Freeport, N.Y., in September as he was towing his disabled 35-foot fishing boat back to port 20 miles away by dragging it behind an inflatable boat he was paddling against the current. (He had covered about 100 yards in three hours.) (2) In August in Middlesex Township, Pa., two men from Virginia, who were on the job for a moving company, were detained by police for public intoxication in a motel parking lot, fighting over the question of whether Virginia is north or south of Pennsylvania.

■ Don’t Criminals Need to Keep a Low Profile? (1) Community activist Steven Myrick, 41, was convicted in October of a rape in Torrance, Calif., that had gone unsolved for seven years. Myrick had called attention to himself during a public housing demonstration in which he mooned police officers and was arrested (and a subsequent DNA test tied him to the rape). (2) Vincent Scheffner, 63, a municipal parking-meter worker in St. Paul, Minn., was under investigation at press time on suspicion of theft after a local credit union reported that he had been regularly depositing, for the last year, enormous amounts of coins into his account.

Perfect Logic

■ Mandy Bailey, who lives in a suburb of Phoenix, is the mother of conjoined 1-year-old girls and wanted to take them to a family reunion in Maryland. She called Delta Air Lines to make sure the girls could ride for free on her ticket. No, said Delta, because even though a child under 2 can ride for free, each infant would need an oxygen mask in case of emergency, and thus, a separate ticket was needed. Bailey kept complaining (giving the story international reach) until a Delta higher-up compromised for the flight: Bailey’s sister-in-law, who had been assigned to another row on the flight, was put next to Bailey so she could share her oxygen with the second twin.