xxxNews Of The Weirdxxx
Bizarre but true stories about real people collected by syndicated columnist Chuck Shepherd.
In January, University of Utah hospital surgeons removed half the skull of Briana Lane, age 22 and unemployed, in order to save her life after an auto accident, but because putting the skull back in place was not quite an emergency, it was delayed by negotiations over cost. The skull remained in a freezer for three months, with Lane battling serious pain (and wearing a plastic helmet for protection, feeling her brain “shifting” on her) while the hospital negotiated with the state Medicaid office, which pays only for long-term “disabilities.” Her skull was finally reattached on April 30.
Among the secret British military plans recently revealed from classified documents:
(1) a huge landmine to be planted during World War II on the German plains (to prevent the Soviet army from overreaching), to be kept at a warm, detonatable temperature by the body heat of thousands of live chickens underground (according to Britain’s National Archives in April);
(2) a post-World War II plan disclosed in May to equip pigeons as suicide dive-bombers carrying explosives and biological agents to a targeted area. (The military said its research showed that homing pigeons could be tricked via electromagnetic fields into sensing that their “home” was actually the target area, but pigeon experts say it is more likely the pigeons would have returned to dive-bomb Britain.)
At the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s “Sex Out Loud” Health Awareness Fair in March, the Feminist Majority organization sponsored a “giant vagina structure” for which students could pay a dollar and stick their heads in to have their pictures taken. Said a spokesperson, “There are a lot of phallic symbols in society, and we wanted to put a vaginal one out there.”
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
