xxxNews Of The Weirdxxx

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

A 27-year-old woman was arrested in League City, Texas, in February after police discovered her 6-year-old daughter wandering around her empty school yard on a Saturday morning. The woman said she dropped the kid off, as usual, but that she was distracted and didn’t realize it was Saturday.

Prominent neuroscientist Louis A. Gottschalk, still professionally active at age 89, lost about $3 million of his family trust over a 10-year period to Nigerian e-mail scammers, according to his son, who wants an Orange County, Calif., judge to remove his father as the estate’s administrator. In fact, Dr. Gottschalk has continued to pay money on another scam because the new recipients are “different Nigerians,” according to the son’s description of a conversation with his father.

In 2003, News of the Weird told the inspirational story of “Star Trek” fanatic Tony Alleyne, who was trying to sell his small apartment in Leistershire, England, for the equivalent of about $1.7 million, after having converted it to a finely detailed model of the starship Enterprise (with transporter control, warp core drive, voice-activated lighting and security, infinity mirror, etc.). In February 2006, Alleyne, weary of the lack of buyer interest, filed for bankruptcy and moved to his Plan B: to gut his “Enterprise” and redesign the place as the bridge of the Voyager (from the later Star Trek series), which he will offer at a lower price.
(Send your Weird News to Chuck Shepherd, P.O. Box 18737, Tampa FL 33679 or [email protected] or go to www.NewsoftheWeird.com.) NEWS OF THE WEIRD