News Of The Weird-733

Bizarre but true stories about real people collected by syndicated columnist Chuck Shepherd. In July, Uttar Pradesh Eunuchs Association, in Lucknow, India, demanded that the district magistrate and the senior superintendent of police order cops to begin exposing fake eunuchs by lifting their skirts to verify their status. Charlatans, according to the group, deprive real eunuchs of “legitimate” income (a large part of which derives from eunuchs’ entering places of business and private parties, exposing themselves and otherwise being obnoxious, and demanding a fee to leave).

Police in West Hartford, Conn., arrested Matthew Flynn, 46, in August for allegedly threatening to castrate a Melly’s ice-cream truck driver with a pair of hedge clippers because the driver blared his jingle on and on and on, even though Flynn told him that no kids lived on the street.

David Owen Rye, 48, was arrested in Los Angeles 10 days earlier for allegedly firing at least three bullets into a Toyota Camry in an apartment-house parking lot because its car alarm wouldn’t shut off.

Apparently, forest fires make the jewel beetle (also known as the black fire beetle) frisky, according to Dr. Helmut Schmitz and colleagues at the University of Bonn (Germany), for males and females will fly toward one in a mating frenzy after detecting even the faraway flickering of flames and crackling of burning wood. Schmitz, and predecessor William George Evans, hypothesized that the fire eliminates the beetle’s predators and prevents tree secretion from trapping the beetle larvae, according to a March report by BBC News.
(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