San Diego Reader February 25, 2016 79
news of the WeiRD
LEAD STORY — Deputy sheriff Michael Szeliga of St. Peters- burg, Florida, in Fort Lauderdale for a weekend training session in July 2015, was to receive a commendation at the formal banquet, for ex- emplary DUI enforcement, presented by Moth- ers Against Drunk Driving. He, escorted by two fellow deputies, arrived for dinner “stag- geringly drunk” (though he did not drive), ac- cording to an internal aff airs investigation, and he was ordered to go sleep it off . (Szeliga wrote an apology and was transferred out of DUI work. Sheriff Bob Gualtieri said Szeliga was a good deputy but that the incident was “one of the most ridiculous things” he’d ever heard of.)
The Aristocrats! — A customer had to be dragged from a burn- ing sex shop by fi refi ghters in the notorious Reeperbahn “sin” section of Hamburg, Ger- many, in November when he refused orders to evacuate. He had shut himself inside a private booth to watch a fi lm (T robbin Hood) and was heard complaining (while coughing from smoke inhalation), “I haven’t fi nished yet.” — Police in Richmond, Virginia, announced in December that high school math teacher Ken- neth Johnson III turned himself in for several recent residential shoe theſt s. Each time, the shoes taken from homes were returned to their owners but with “bodily fl uids” added.
New World Order — Recently added to the list of words and phrases to be offi cially discouraged on campus, according to the University of Wisconsin-Mil-
waukee’s website: “political correctness.” T e phrase is said to be a “microaggression” that might make some students feel uncomfortable or unsafe if they hear it or read it. — In November, the University of Vermont held a (voluntary) three-day “retreat” open only to students who “self-identify as white,” so that they can study the implications of “white privilege” in society (e.g., “what does it mean to be white?” and “how does whiteness impact you?”).
Government Inaction — T e Queens (New York) Redbird Tourist In- formation Center was fi nally ordered to close in July following an extraordinarily unsuccessful seven-year run in which, possibly, not a single tourist ever walked through the door. T e New York Post, interviewing neighbors in Kew Gar- dens, found no one who ever saw a visitor, and the center’s lone staff member said she recalled only lunchtime drop-ins from jury duty at the criminal court building down the block.
The Continuing Crisis — Marshall University (Huntington, West Vir- ginia), seeking a “star free agent” for its medical faculty, hired neurosurgeon Paul Muizelaar in July despite controversy from his previous work at the University of California, Davis. T ere, Dr. Muizelaar and colleagues, in a daring experi- ment, introduced live bowel bacteria into the brain — on lab rats — supposedly to stimulate the immune system when other remedies had faltered. However, Dr. Muizelaar, emboldened, also introduced the bacteria into brains of a
man and two women who had highly malig- nant glioblastoma tumors (each patient having consented). However, two died within weeks, and although the third survived more than a year, UC Davis found numerous protocol viola- tions. Dr. Muizelaar’s new supervisor told the Associated Press that he nonetheless felt lucky to land him because “not everybody wants to move to Appalachia.” — Elaine Williams, 47, was arrested in Decem- ber in North Forsyth, Georgia, and charged with trying to buy a baby for her daughter, 14, via an ad on Craigslist. Williams said her daughter said she “wanted a baby and would get one with or without [my] help.”
People with Issues — Social science professor Dr. Jeff Justice re- signed from the faculty at Tarleton State Uni- versity (Stephenville, Texas) in October to head off an investigation into whether he supplied alcohol to students and proselytized at least one to undergo a self-mutilation practice. Justice admitted, post-resignation, that he was a devo- tee (since age 13) of the “Sundance” ritual, in which he would hang from a tree in his back- yard by hooks connected to stakes in his bare chest and that he demonstrated it to some stu- dents but apparently interested none. He attrib- uted the incidents to “severe depression.”
Update — Road to Nowhere: T e “Bridge to Nowhere” played an outsize role in politics a decade ago as an example of uncontrolled government spend- ing (before Congress killed it). (Ketchikan,
by Chuck Shepherd © 2016
Alaska, planned a sleek international airport on nearby, uninhabited Gravina Island, but needed a sleek $450 million bridge to get there.) T ese days, reported Alaska Dispatch News in No- vember, the original 3.2-mile, $28 million ac- cess road on Gravina Island, built to access the bridge, now just ends in a “scrub forest.” One optimistic state offi cial said the road gets “more use all the time” — boaters come for “hunting and fi shing, berry picking, things like that. It’s actually a nice road.”
Recurring Themes — As chronicled in 2010 and 2011, Iraqi police (either corrupt or sincerely unsophisticated) continued to purchase worthless bomb “detec- tors” to use at checkpoints in Baghdad, instill- ing residents with a false sense of security, with the result that hundreds of people died in sup- posedly safe neighborhoods. Briton James Mc- Cormick, the most successful con man/seller, is serving a ten-year sentence for the “ADE 651” (which, somehow, Baghdad police continued to buy long aſt er the U.S. had warned of the scam). Since then, more bogus detectors have been peddled to T ailand and other governments. In November 2015, London’s Independent, in a dispatch from the Egyptian resort Sharm el- Sheikh, reported that luxury hotels’ security offi cers are now using similar bogus detectors to reassure tourists frightened by the recent ter- rorism-suspected Russian plane crash in Egypt.
Send your Weird News to Chuck Shepherd, San Di- ego Reader, P.O. Box 85803, San Diego, CA 92186 or to
WeirdNewsTips@Yahoo.com
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