News Of The Weird-473

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

A family has been found in Kurdish Turkey whose members walk on all fours, use the palms of their hands for balance, and stand upright only with difficulty, according to researchers who filmed the family for a March British television show. According to Professor Nicholas Humphrey of the London School of Economics, scientists’ best guess for the family’s condition is that their inbreeding caused the reprise of genetic traits long thought to have been evolutionarily passed over. Man’s Best Friend (Except Sometimes)

In February, two girls (aged 12 and 13) ran away from home in Cleveland, headed by bus for Minneapolis, along with Bambi, one girl’s family dog (represented to the driver as a “guide dog”). However, the girls overfed Bambi on junk food, and the dog became so flatulent as to cause a commotion on the bus, which eventually drew police officers, who then discovered the girls were runaways.

In February, the Missourian newspaper reported that Columbia resident Adam Ballard, 22, now in his second year in the Army, is overeating and under-exercising so as to gain weight rapidly and exceed the Army’s body-fat requirement, which will force his discharge rather than his deployment to the Middle East war zone. According to The Columbian, 3,285 soldiers were discharged for excess body fat in 2004 (although not all were war-zone shirkers). Ballard said he had no qualms because recruiters had originally assured him a desk job.

In February in Pattaya, Thailand, the woman who was the former Guinness Book recordholder for living in a cage with scorpions was married to the man who holds the equivalent record for time spent with centipedes, with consummation immediately afterward in a coffin. (Kanchana Ketkaew had stayed 32 days with 3,400 scorpions and Bunthawee Siengwong 28 days with 1,000 centipedes.)
(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