xxxNews Of The Weirdxxx

Bizarre but true stories about real people collected by syndicated columnist Chuck Shepherd.

Dennett Colescott, 41, was arrested at a drugstore in Corte Madera, Calif., in April after an employee reported to police that Colescott was standing at the store’s photo printer, calmly copying child pornography.

News of the Weird reported in 1998 on the emerging Hollywood trademark battle between the creators of TV’s “Ren & Stimpy” and “South Park” over who had original rights to a cartoon character who was an animated piece of excrement (John Kricfalusi’s “Nutty the Friendly Dump” or South Park’s “Mr. Hankey the Christmas Poo”). In April 2004, a South Korean company announced it was planning a major U.S. media launch of a short, philosophical children’s film with the clay-animation character “Doggy Poo” (who, in one scene, asks a guru, “What am I good for?” and receives the answer, “God has not created you for no reason. He must have a good plan for you”).

School System Accountability: The principal of one of Washington, D.C.’s, roughest-neighborhood elementary schools was revealed in late 2003 to have obtained her doctorate degree from a diploma mill, but her school system supervisors decided in April to impose no punishment (except to drop her salary to what master’s-degree principals get).

Also in April, the school system declined to punish the 110 employees it identified who had vastly and improperly overspent using D.C. government credit cards, pointing out that investigators had no evidence of “personal gain” from the uses (but then admitting that their investigation stopped short of looking for such personal gain).

Send your Weird News to Chuck Shepherd, P.O. Box 18737, Tampa, Fla. 33679 or [email protected]
Copyright © 2001 by Chuck Shepherd

NEWS OF THE WEIRD